Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

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"I have stood knee deep in mud and bone, and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved! This is your coming century! They will eat them, Mandus! They will make pigs of you all! And they will bury their snouts into your ribs, and they will eat. Your. Hearts!"

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a pseudo-sequel to the infamous on /tg/ survival horror video-game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It was followed by spiritual successor SOMA.

Although not as scary as the original Amnesia, that's kind of like saying that the Black Plague isn't as scary as Ebola; it's still an awesomely creepy game in its own right and really worth checking out.

Plot

On New Year's Eve, 1899, wealthy industrialist Oswald Mandus awakens from feverish dreams of a vicious, dark, elaborate machine of mysterious purpose to find himself alone in his vast, empty mansion. Alone, save for the voices of his twin sons, Edwin and Enoch, calling for him to come and find them. Taking up an electric lantern, Oswald starts to wander the halls, where things get more and more mysterious. Strange devices litter the place, and secret passageways reveal themselves - often with smears of blood along their length.

Down on the ground floor, a ringing telephone beckons him to answer, where a stranger's voice pleads for Oswald to find him; a great machine lies beneath the grounds of his mansion and its surrounding buildings, a machine that has been damaged, and trapped his sons in its depths. Oswald must fix the machine if he is to save them.

Unsure of what the hell is going on, but indifferent, Oswald does as he is instructed. His determination to find his children never wavers, even as more and more unsettling things are displayed before him. Drawers filled with glasses and false teeth, engines that run on toxic concoctions, a church with pig-faced Mary statues and a butchered pig's carcass on the altar. Not even the reveal of the machine's strange guardians, grotesque amalgamations of human and pig that snuffle their way through the darkness, hunting for human victims, deters him. Death or damnation, he will' find his boys!

And all the while, the strange pleads to him through the phones, exhorting him to fix the machine. Which, as Mandus soon finds, is a massive mechanized slaughterhouse, a whirling engine of butchering blades and grinding gears and worse.

As Mandus makes his way deeper and deeper into the depths, the truth slowly comes to light. This terrible machine was built to slay not pigs, but people, rendering them into food and into manpigs with equal diligence. And as Mandus repairs it, the machine activates, unleashing its manpig workers to harvest more "product" to be processed. But who could have created this abominable device?

...Why, Mandus himself. As he finally recalls, too late, he found a strange enchanted mask during a trip to South America, which drove him mad with horrific visions of the coming decades. His sons are already dead, slain by his own hands to save them from foreseen deaths in the Battle of Somme, and his madness compelled him to create the Machine to change the future. He realised what horrors he had wrought before, but failed to do more than damage it, in the process losing his memory and being transported back to his mansion.

With nothing left to live for, Mandus makes the ultimate sacrifice to atone; he destroys the Machine, at the cost of his own life.

Sequel?

So, you're probably wondering; what the hell connection does this have to Amnesia: The Dark Descent? There's no character connection, nor a story connection. That's true. But, the game is set in the same world; you can find journals from Mandus revealing he actually recovered notes, formulas and even the corpse of one of the Grunts from the ruins of Brennenburg, which were instrumental in his creations of the Manpigs and his own "Compound X" formula, which is based roughly on Vitae. Even the Machine itself actually contains a shattered Orb, similar to the one Daniel found in his doomed expedition those 60 years ago.

Gameplay

Like The Dark Descent before it, A Machine for Pigs is a survival horror game with a heavy emphasis on the "survival" aspect. You have no weapons, you can't fight back, the monsters move damn quick, and if they catch you, you will die in a couple of hits. Brains and stealth are your only means for survival in the guts of the Machine. This game is somewhat easier than its predecessor; there's no sanity meter in play, reflecting how Mandus is just that much more a hardcore bastard than Daniel was, and likewise there's no need for an inventory. You don't even need to gather fuel for your lantern. The downside is that the Manpigs are much smarter than the Gatherers and have a much keener sense for the light, so it's a lot easy to trip up and set them on yourself. Also, once a Manpig spawns, it stays spawned, so you better get good at sneaking, because they just won't stop looking for you.