I'll just jump right in with this one.
If you were a fan of Amnesia:The Dark Descent and were avidly watching and waiting for this game to come out hoping it was going to be more of the same, you were most likely disappointed.
The musical score of the game was impressive overall.
The scale of the game felt massive at time, as if you were truly in the bowels of this giant infernal machine.
The story itself while holding no real surprises was GOOD and the many notes you found told a spectacularly spooky story.
I'm not fast while playing games. I like to inspect every nook and cranny. I search for easter eggs, angles to catch video for possible gifsets, etc. Keeping all that in mind, it took me just under 3 1/2 hours to complete this game.
The monstrous creations themselves. Out of the entire game there were only 2 times where I was chased or felt actively threatened by them. Everything but those 2 instances could be avoided or easily outrun by leaps and bounds. The game spent much more time making you feel empathy for them(Seeing them playing with children's blocks, rocking back and forth alone in cells, sleeping on top of metal cages, laying chained in corners, etc) than making you feel any kind of fear of them. You even stumble upon them trying to have a nice dinner, complete with candlelight and music. Instead of horrifying you it instills pity for these poor manmade beasts.
Everything that Frictional Games(The original developers behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent) included to make their game immersive and truly scary was carefully excised by handing the reins over to a dev team, The Chinese Room.
You're armed with an electric lantern that never goes out(Though it will flicker when monsters are nearby) and set loose in an incredibly linear environment. I never had doubts about where I was or which direction I should be going.
A major gripe would be that the removal of any inventory system and the inability to interact with most objects in your environment effectively removed all puzzles. There were so few things in your environment that you could interact with that being able to pick up and move anything besides a chair instantly told you that you needed to carry it somewhere in your immediately vicinity or turn/switch it. There was no scavenging for vital items, the few movable items were fairly obvious and basically handed to you.
If there is one thing I think this game got right it was the story. It was far more interesting to me than Daniel's, though also incredibly obvious from nearly the very beginning who you were and what had taken place. EVEN with those roadblocks, I think the dialogue and notes told a chilling tale. The downside? The harrowing story told by finding scraps of your pre-Amnesia journal is by FAR the spookiest part of the game and will interest you more than pretty much anything taking place visually. Which is a good thing, because there is so. goddamn. much. text. At least if you're going to throw nigh-constant walls of text at a player(I would wager 1/4-1/5 of my time was spent reading notes, quite serious on this) it had better be well written and interesting. Luckily, it was! I just wish it hadn't come at me in droves.
In the end, the notes might have been the most interesting part of the game. They were certainly the scariest, as all Mandus' creations but for 2 were pretty much non-factors and no threat to you. I injured myself more touching a shorted-out switch panel than by any monster in the game. For the vast majority of the game there is no sense of imminent danger or threat.
The climax of the game was no surprise to anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together and satisfying in a way the rest of the game wasn't.
Overall, I can't say Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is a game I'd enthusiastically recommend. For fans of the original I would probably point them towards the myriad custom campaigns built for the first game, for anybody that had played neither I would just say play the first one and stick with it.
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izzy806
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