- Developer: The Chinese Room
- Game: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
- Price: £14.99 (on Steam at time of review)
INTRODUCTION:
In the year 1899 you will play as a wealthy industrialist and butcher called Oswald Mandus, and it is in London on New Years’ Eve. He has just returned from Mexico from an expedition that clearly didn’t go very well, and throughout the game you will hear voices from what are apparently his sons Edwin and Enoch. Soon into the game you get a call on the phone from someone only known as “the Engineer” who says his sons have been trapped far below in the “Machine” that Mandus himself created beneath his giant house. So with all that you’d expect this game to be an absolutely fantastic sequel to the hugely successful Amnesia: The Dark Descent, right? … NOPE!
The first problem I noticed when I stupidly pre-ordered this game was that it wasn’t the Frictional Games guys who were taking care of this admittedly well constructed game. Guys called The Chinese Room instead took charge of this project, probably because the Frictional team were busy with another game, The Chinese Room, let’s call them TCR for short, are responsible for games like, Dear Esther, and the new game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. I will say, for a team getting such a big franchise to make a sequel to, they could have done a LOT worse, and at times I did feel immersed in this game, and was genuinely terrified at times.
Like the first Amnesia, this plays exactly the same in every way, and it has that manually opening the door thing that the first had. A huge problem to this game however is the fact that most of this game isn’t actually survival horror to me, most of it is for you to enjoy the experience rather than try and survive. Sure you will find yourself having to run from the enemies at times, but overall the game is mostly there to serve as an interactive movie where you experience the environment, rather than being scared to turn every corner. Although this is the case, it is still somewhat of a worthwhile game to survival horror fans, as the first playthrough you will be scared more times than not.
