The electric lantern still works. That is about the only thing Oswald Mandus can count on in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, The Chinese Room’s 2013 follow-up to Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Frictional Games published it. It came to Windows on 10 September 2013, and it reached PlayStation 4 on 22 November 2016 inside the Amnesia Collection, bundled with The Dark Descent and its Amnesia: Justine expansion. It also runs on Linux, Mac, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. It is a first-person survival horror game, single player, and it scores 7.3 out of 10.
The score matches the IGDB critic aggregate across eight outlets. That number is fair, and the reasons for it are specific.
Trailer, via IGN.
Oswald Mandus Wakes on New Year’s Eve
The game opens in London on New Year’s Eve, 1899. Mandus is a wealthy industrialist and butcher. He wakes from a fever that has lasted several months, after a disastrous expedition to explore Aztec ruins in Mexico. His sons, Edwin and Enoch, call to him through the house.
Then “the Engineer” telephones. The Engineer says the boys are trapped far below, inside the Machine that Mandus built beneath his own house. The Machine has been sabotaged. The Engineer wants Mandus to clear the floodwaters and bring it back online, and he guides him by telephone through the facility.
The setup is strong and the delivery is uneven. Mandus descends through a house that shakes at the will of some infernal machine, and in this writer’s reading the game never settles on whether it wants to be a haunted-house story or a factory-floor one.
The Manpigs and the Machine
Some areas are patrolled by manpigs: monstrous humanoid pigs who chase and attack Mandus on sight. They are the game’s central image, and the source of its best and worst moments.
Mandus reactivates the Machine. The Engineer betrays him, takes control, and unleashes the manpigs into the streets of London to round up victims with which to feed itself.
Mandus then recovers his memory. After Mexico, he was consumed by a vision of the future shown to him by an artifact his children found in an Aztec temple, known as the “egg,” hinted to be an Orb. In that vision he sees horrors and atrocities of the coming century, including Edwin and Enoch’s deaths at the Battle of the Somme. Driven mad, he builds the Machine. The game’s several storylines interlock, some past, some present, some overtly real and some possibly imagined.
It will bury its snout into your ribs and it will eat your heart.
That line comes from the game’s own summary, and it is a better pitch than the game usually earns.
What The Chinese Room Removed
The core mechanics carry over from The Dark Descent, but The Chinese Room cut several of them for the sake of a fresh experience. The inventory system is gone. So is the need to find oil and tinderboxes to keep the lights on. Most puzzles are now based on physically interacting with the environment.
The sanity mechanic is gone too. Standing in darkness and looking at enemies no longer carry any drawback. Health regenerates after a period when Mandus is injured, so there is no need to hunt for items to restore it.
| System in The Dark Descent | Status in A Machine for Pigs |
|---|---|
| Inventory | Removed |
| Oil and tinderboxes for light | Removed |
| Sanity mechanic | Removed |
| Health items | Removed; health regenerates |
| Puzzle basis | Physical interaction with the environment |
| Level design | Larger areas, outdoor environments included |
| Enemy AI | Adjusted so players cannot predict behavior from the first game |
The table is the whole argument in miniature. Every removal makes the game easier to play and less frightening to be inside. The lantern is a convenience, not a resource. The dark is a place, not a threat.
Larger Rooms, Fewer Reasons to Fear Them
The level design is significantly different from The Dark Descent, with larger areas and outdoor environments. Enemy AI was adjusted so players cannot predict manpig behavior based on their experience with the original game.
That last change is the smartest thing here. Players who learned the first game’s rules cannot carry those rules over, and for a while that works. But unpredictability is not the same as dread. The manpigs chase and attack on sight, and because death costs little, the chase stops mattering.
The larger rooms hurt too. The Dark Descent squeezed players through corridors and made every door a decision. A Machine for Pigs opens the space up, and open space is where horror goes to relax.
A Story Told Through Notes and Telephones
Players explore and interact with environments using the electric lantern, and find diary entries and notes that fill in Mandus’s lost memory. The Engineer’s ongoing guidance comes through telephones placed throughout the facility.
This is the game’s real achievement. The Chinese Room, the studio behind Dear Esther, knows how to build a place that tells you what happened without a cutscene. The telephones give the Engineer a voice, and the notes give Mandus a past he cannot hold onto. The interlocking timelines — past, present, real, imagined — are ambitious and mostly hold together.
The problem is Mandus himself. He is a wealthy butcher who built a machine under his house, and the game wants his guilt to carry the ending. It does not, quite. The reveal lands as a plot fact rather than a feeling.
The 7.3 and What It Measures
The game received mixed reviews from critics. The 7.3 aggregate across eight outlets captures that split accurately. This is not a bad game. In this writer’s view it set aside the pressure of its predecessor and kept only the atmosphere, a trade that cost more than it gained.
The story is the reason to play it. The Aztec egg, the vision of the Somme, the Engineer’s betrayal, the manpigs in the London streets — that is a real piece of horror writing, and it earns the ending even when the mechanics do not.
The mechanics are the reason to leave. Remove the inventory, remove the oil, remove the sanity meter, remove the health items, and what is left is a walking tour with occasional running. The first game made you afraid of the dark. This one makes the dark a room you walk through.
Where This Leaves the Series
A Machine for Pigs began as a mod. It became an indirect sequel set in the same universe as The Dark Descent, with a new cast and a new time period. That origin shows. It has the shape of a sequel and the scope of something smaller, and the parts that work best are the parts that ignore the first game entirely.
The Chinese Room’s instincts were right about the writing and wrong about the systems. The notes, the telephones, the interlocking timelines — those are the studio’s strengths, and they survive. The stripped mechanics are the studio’s reach into a genre it did not fully understand, and they do not.
Frictional Games published it. That matters, because The Dark Descent was both developed and published by Frictional, and handing the sequel to another studio was a deliberate bet. On this paper’s reading, the bet produced a better story and a lesser game. Both of those things are true, and the 7.3 is what happens when they cancel out.
For anyone coming to the series now, the Amnesia Collection on PlayStation 4 is the sensible entry point, since it holds The Dark Descent, Justine and this one together. Play The Dark Descent first. Then play A Machine for Pigs for the story, and do not expect the fear to follow you out.
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