One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

When I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent back in March, I wasn’t the biggest fan. The game excelled when it came to atmosphere, but some of the mechanics came across as underbaked and the whole thing felt like a slog at times. This left me wondering how I would feel about The Dark Descent’s first sequel, 2013’s Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, especially given its generally lesser reputation among series fans. Would it fail to connect with me like its predecessor did, or would I find something of a diamond in the rough? The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

As with The Dark Descent, A Machine for Pigs was published by Frictional Games. Whereas the former was also developed by Frictional, however, A Machine for Pigs was instead developed by British studio The Chinese Room, best known at the time as the creators of the narrative-focused adventure game Dear Esther. Taking place on December 31, 1899, the cusp of a new century, A Machine for Pigs puts players in the shoes of extremely wealthy meat processing magnate Oswald Mandus. Waking up in his bed feverish and unable to recall certain recent events, the widower sets off to search his labyrinthine mansion for his two young sons, to no avail. Soon he is contacted over the radio by a mysterious voice claiming that the machine Mandus had built beneath his factory – a machine he has no recollection of – has been sabotaged and flooded, trapping his children. Following the voice’s instructions, it is up to Mandus to undo the sabotage and fix the Machine before it is too late. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll be able to figure out what the contraption was built for in the first place.

Starting with the negatives, the biggest fault of A Machine for Pigs is in its gameplay – or lack thereof. So much of The Dark Descent’s mechanical complexity is sanded down without really being replaced by anything in return. The Dark Descent’s most famous mechanic, sanity, is completely gone. While I wasn’t a huge fan of how it had been implemented in that game (as I would have liked to have seen more varied effects and more serious consequences), I would have preferred a revamp over it being scrapped entirely. Also gone is the inventory and any semblance of resource management. No storing of oil means that your lantern’s light is now limitless, while all healing is done automatically over time rather than through collected bottles of laudanum. The loss of the inventory decreases the complexity of the puzzles somewhat as well, resulting in most puzzles seeming to consist of either ‘turn this valve’ or ‘pick up this object and move it a short distance’. Speaking of the latter, The Dark Descent was fairly well known for the high degree of interactability it allowed with its environment; almost any object lying about could be picked up and thrown. A Machine for Pigs makes the unfortunate decision to toss much of this out as well, as now the only objects that can be interacted with are important puzzle items and, strangely, chairs.

The loss of these gameplay mechanics results in A Machine for Pigs having a gameplay style often pejoratively referred to as a walking simulator. While I’m a lot less negative on that term than other people, it’s hard to deny that the gameplay of A Machine for Pigs suffers significantly compared to The Dark Descent and other games in the genre when it comes to engaging the player. On the other hand, as mentioned previously I had found The Dark Descent something of a slog due in part to the execution of some of its mechanics, so this isn’t necessarily all bad for A Machine for Pigs.

The enemy encounters are a bit more of a mixed bag. I actually found the Manpigs, the main enemies in the game, a tad creepier than the Grunts from The Dark Descent, and I appreciated that they didn’t just despawn after thirty seconds of not finding the player as the Grunts tended to do. I also liked that, as with the Grunts, the game takes its time in introducing them to help build up the suspense; I don’t think I encountered one until after the first-hour mark. The problem, however, is two-fold. For one thing, it feels like there are actually very few monsters that the player encounters that can harm them, in part because the game is quite fond of showing the creatures for aesthetic purposes behind gates or other obstructions that prevent them from reaching the player. And then when the player does find a Manpig, they are immediately alerted to its presence by the light of the lantern flickering. This and the combination of the auto-healing and the lack of a sanity mechanic almost always makes it worth it to just run past them at full speed. As a result, the Manpigs can end up feeling less impactful than the Grunts in the long run.

Where the game does prove to be a bit stronger is the environmental design. One of the things I really liked about The Dark Descent was the level of detail put into the environments of Castle Brennenburg despite the so-so graphics. Shelves, books, tools, bits of machinery, everywhere you looked there was usually something to see, something to keep the tunnels and chambers from feeling empty and entirely devoid of life. A Machine for Pigs is much the same in this regard, further helped by a much larger variety of environments to explore than its predecessor had. (There are even a few outdoor areas, something only briefly included in The Dark Descent.) One moment you might be walking through an eccentrically designed manor full of hidden passageways, then the next you might be on the moonlit streets of London, or a church riddled with twisted porcine imagery, or a factory inhabited by massive, earth-shaking pistons. Through it all the game is able to maintain a disquieting sense of dread through its use of darkness. Unfortunately it does go a little too far in that respect, with certain areas being incredibly difficult to navigate even with the lantern and practically impossible without it. Given that the only way to successfully stealth your way past enemies is to turn the lantern off, this really isn’t ideal and just pushed me more towards my ‘run past every enemy’ strategy. I feel like The Dark Descent struck a much better balance most of the time between obscuring the player’s vision and still having enough light for simple navigation. On the whole, though, A Machine for Pigs does a fantastic job with its environments.

By far the best part of the game, however, is the story. From the start I found Mandus’s predicament and the mystery surrounding the Machine to be a strong hook, and the revelations that unfold about the contraption’s purpose and the process of its construction manage to be both narratively satisfying and increasingly horrifying as the game progresses. The directions the plot goes color Mandus’s character in some fascinating ways, resulting in a protagonist quite unlike any others I’ve encountered in this genre so far. It also feels relatively well-paced, at least in comparison to The Dark Descent. A Machine for Pigs does perhaps rely a bit too much on text documents to develop its story (and on sometimes overwrought pig metaphors, too), but I still found them an engrossing read all the same. And everything culminates in a monologue towards the game’s end that I’ve frequently seen hailed as one of the best and most chilling speeches in any video game, an assertion I can’t really quibble with.

(Note that the following video does contain some spoilers, so make sure to skip it if you are planning to play the game.)

As with several other of the more polarizing games I’ve covered so far – Deadly Premonition, Silent Hill 4, Resident Evil 3 Remake, etc. – Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a difficult game for me to rank. There are things it does really, really well, but then there are an equal number of areas where it struggles mightily. The severely lacking gameplay in particular weighs the game down, ultimately pushing it to the lower end of my ranking. At the same time, the excellent story and atmosphere (and pretty fantastic soundtrack, too) keep it from being a game I can dismiss out of hand. In fact, I think I may have actually liked A Machine for Pigs better than The Dark Descent. (Heresy, I know.) If nothing else, this game has continued to pique my interest in one of The Chinese Room’s other, more recent (and more positively received) projects, Still Wakes the Deep, which I am planning to cover at some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil (OG), Resident Evil 2 (OG), Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Tormented Souls 2, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Alone in the Dark (2024), Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol, Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, Penumbra: Requiem, Lamentum, Outlast, Outlast 2, Carnival Massacre, Late Homework, Routine, Alan Wake 2, White Night, Onimusha, Onimusha 2, Heavy Metal Death Can, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, NightCry, Nightmare of Decay, Ground Zero, White Night, Still Wakes the Deep, The Chant, Silent Hill: Townfall, Maid of Sker, DreadOut

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

1. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (9.5/10)
2. Resident Evil Remake (9.5/10)
3. Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
4. Signalis (9/10)
5. Dead Space (2008) (9/10)
6. Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
7. Sorry We’re Closed (9/10)
8. Resident Evil Requiem (9/10)
9. Cronos: The New Dawn (9/10)
10. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
11. Crow Country (8.5/10)
12. Fear the Spotlight (8.5/10)
13. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (8.5/10)
14. Subversive Memories (8/10)
15. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
16. Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
17. Silent Hill f (8/10)
18. Resident Evil 3 Remake (7.5/10)
19. Resident Evil 4 (7/10)
20. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (7/10)
21. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (7/10)
22. Alone in the Dark (1992) (7/10)
23. Deadly Premonition (5/10)

Up Next: Silent Hill: Townfall

Header image courtesy of Frictional Games.