u/CyanLight9

Disclaimer: This review is meant to reflect my experience with the game. It is not a personal attack against you or the game's developers. If you disagree, that's fine, but please be civil about it.

Regardless of how much you want them to, memories never truly vanish; they only wash away into the fecund sepulchre that is the back of your mind. Hence why, before binging the Amnesia series on a whim, probably to catch up and indulge in longing, I remembered nothing about Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, aside from a few random details. As for why it was the details they were, I haven't the foggiest idea; it befuddles me still. I also don't know why I forgot as much as I did, since there are plenty of memorable things here, albeit definitely not all of them are good. The only Amnesia game not developed by Frictional Games, since other matter drew their eyes and toil(this was made by The Chinese Room), is full of wonders that one can scarcely imagine and blunders the likes of which you cannot conceive. But mine is not a painted mouth; it is one that calls upon Atlatl, dew, and droplets above, and out of the resulting batch of flowers, while the narrative blooms are beautiful beyond compare, the technical ones that made the first dark batch a beloved classic are neglected if not smothered in the earth entirely without a fertile replacement. A hauntingly beautiful sonnet rendered half illegible and repulsive to the touch by the blood-soaked parchment it's written on. A sequel defined by its limitations to an original that was defined by overcoming them.

Positives:

Starting with the part that most of you were feverishly anticipating, the story that A Machine for Pigs tells is simply exquisite. To say that writer Dan Pinchbeck has crafted one of the best stories that you can find in any horror game is only a small exaggeration. You are the damningly named Oswald Mandus(mayhaps you have a sister named Sarah Thustra). You have awoken from a vision of a machine that your fevered brain conjured up, remembering naught but your name, and things are, by your era's standard, queerish. Strange in that your bed is immersed in iron bars, stranger still that your darling sons, Edwin and Enoch, are missing. After the strangest phone call(sincerely, it is very strange) demanding sacrifice, your worst fears are confirmed: your children are lost to the machinery below, taken in the jaws of iron and eyes of inbred offal. You must play the role of Dante and save them. Without spoiling the mystery of how all of this came to be, what follows is a fin de siècle tale full of gothic madness, blasphemies of the body, societal nihilism, class angst of the hypocritical kind, Aztec symbolism, concerns involving industrial ethics and lack thereof, and a healthy dose of fatalism. What I just divulged is hardly even a quarter of what the game is trying to explore here; it's an incredibly dense narrative that will make you look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, and make you conclude that telling the difference is nigh impossible. Oh, and in case you were curious as to whether The Dark Descent is required reading for this one, there is a vague connection between the two games, a hereditary one, but it's very loose, and you don't necessarily need to know about it. The story is told via notes, phonograph recordings, flashbacks, and various monologues, given in a Nolanesque way. All of these methods work very well, especially the monologues. Dan Pinchbeck is a master at writing monologues, and here, he's at the top of his game, especially the final one, which might be one of the best in gaming. It's also not often that I praise a game for its prose, but in this case, the way notes and dialogue are written here is beautiful. Every sentence is full of poetry, rich language, symbolism, and multiple meanings, with not a single one being superfluous. It's like you're reading one of the gothic classics of yore. I suppose I could take some petty prods at some elements and say that some of the story and themes are a bit too closely tied to vague symbolism to have their full effect or that the pig metaphors are overwrought and pretentious at times, but those, as I said, are petty. Nitpicks to an otherwise impeccable annal, a flawless batch of feathers.

Like fine art, it takes time to appreciate it, but the art direction in this game is superb. Everything in it, from the environment to the decorations, from the inhabitants to the butchered remains, from the machine's depths to the streets of London, all of it is rendered in a heavily gothic style and color palette. The level of detail the game tries to implement, even in the slightest, is quite admirable. It seems as if a coyote-headed primate has touched all of the game's textures with his paws; the large machinery, the desks, the doors, the paintings, even the smallest of switches. It is most prevalent in Mandus's Mansion and the chemical mixing chamber. The loading screens being stylized with fancy blueprints is also a nice touch, and a bow on this gothic box.

The largest improvement from the original, aside from the story, comes from the character models. While this is admittedly partly because there aren't that many, just the manpigs, Edwin, Enoch, and the odd London citizen here and there. Those models look great though, the manpigs' forms are filthy types; horrid even to the slightest resemblance. Edwin and Enoch are the perfect combination of goodly and ghastly, and the other citizens, while not as well rendered as the others, do their job well enough, and to be fair, you're not supposed to see those swine for more than half a second(unless you're me). The fact that they are all rendered in the game's gloriously gothic art style is incredible generosity on top of it all.

The voice acting is also a substantial upgrade from the original, which was situationally good, to here, which is consistently great. All of the actors do a great job at bringing these characters to life. Whether it's Mandus's delusions, the Engineer's bleak poetry, Professor A's perverted filial piety for the lower classes, or The Machine's Napoleon complex, no quirk is left unexplored. I'll give MVA to Mark Roper(Robert Zemeckis diehard will know him) for pulling double duty as both Professor A and The Machine. He portrays the subtle, blind arrogance of the bourgeoisie and the roar of a demon, long caged, with equal fervor. A true Jade Snail turn.

The sound design is pretty incredible for the most part. The background audio is rich, visceral, and full of layers and textures that work well together. The echoes and clangs of machinery, the crackle of electricity, the stink of the Victorian London air quality that you can practically feel on your skin, the reverb of the church, and the marvelous mayhem of Act 3 are all amazing. The object audio is still intact: the ringing of wooden phones, the creaking doors and drawers, the shattering of glass, thrown objects make the right noises, and even the smallest of switches are up to par. The voice audio is crisp and really lets the spoken lines shine. The humans and their vocalized offal, the static in the recordings, the manpigs, children of man and metal, what music they all make! There are a couple of downsides; the mixing is a little off(the spoken dialogue is quiet and tends to get drowned out), it doesn't have the same rawness and assaultive nature as Dark Descent, and the same great sound is rarely used for horror purposes. If you are scared by anything purely audio-related, it's likely coincidental. However, the likely outcome is that you will be too enraptured by this Blood Metal orchestral to notice or care.

Mixed:

The soundtrack is in a very unfortunate position. On a technical level, composer Jessica Curry(fun fact: she is married to Pinchbeck and was co-head of the studio for a while) has done an excellent job. Her orchestral score, full of strings, ivory, and masterful choirs, is haunting, beautiful, and surprisingly grand for a horror game like this. Tracks like "New Year's Eve", "The Church", "Christ Have Mercy", "Mors Praematura", and "Mandus" are exemplary of these qualities. The main motif found in "Mandus Awakes" is also oddly reminiscent of Hans Zimmer's Dune score. The ambient tracks like "Compound X" and "Clockwork Soul" have these same perks and also include an eerie metallic sound throughout them. All of it sounds like the spider monkey has breathed them into existence purely for this story. The problem is that none of it is taken advantage of. With the exception of "New Year's Eve", which is the main menu theme, and "The Church", which is played... well... you can guess, all of the tracks listed above, and all of the tracks I didn't list for brevity's sake are crammed into Act 3. The ambient tracks are even more wasted because of their dynamic implementation. The ambient tracks are played only when you are doing a puzzle, watching the fruits of a solved puzzle, are near something that wants you dead, or are being chased by that thing, the music varying in intensity depending on the scenario. Anyone familiar with this game's bastard gameplay will know that this means the ambient tracks play at a frequency of almost never. This means that 80% of the game is as silent as Florence Foster Jenkins's greatest hits album. The last 20% of the game may be heaven on the ears, but it really didn't have to be this way.

The characters that inhabit this cactus fruit basket are also in an awkward position, but this time, it's by design. On paper, most of the characters are great. You have Oswald Mandus, fatalistic inventor, messianic butcher, and charitable misanthrope supreme, the cynical, eccentric, and poetry-obsessed Engineer, the barely disguised bourgeois called Professor A, and The Machine, a sentient thing. Or maybe quarter-sentient is a better description, since it knows only hate. Even the manpigs, malicious from their misery, are given personality behind iron bars. The downsides start with Oswald's family: Edwin and Enoch are blank shells and are only there for plot reasons, and Lilibeth(or just Lily, if you prefer)is only there to be associated with the feathered bitch through childbirth, because we all know that the oppressed are interesting only in death. The main problem with these characters is that this story makes the same narrative choice that doomed Little Hope; the plot events and narrative structure ultimately render all but one character completely pointless. Unlike Little Hope, which did this through incompetence, A Machine for Pigs does so intentionally for character study purposes. The one character who does end up mattering is Oswald, the best character in the game, so at least there's that. However, the fact remains that Pinchbeck wondered if this story would be lovelier when you are alone, and in that wondering, he rendered the game's heart cold, shackled its jaws in ice, and crusted its eyes with frost. Thus, the story and characters could reach perfection.

Mandus's Meatpacking Factory, the place where this horror goes down, is a vast well of missed potential. As stated above, it all looks great. Mandus's hypocritical and man-whorish mansion, the offal-inducing streets of London, and the factory where the machine is, which is almost alive with how organized, oiled, and intricate its various parts are. All of them have a solid, spooky atmosphere as well. It's too bad that you can't explore any of it. This game is Final Fantasy XIII levels of linear, and while it's not as bad a thing here as it is in Final Fantasy XIII, it's still a hindrance. You only get to see some of the mansion, select parts of the factory, only a few streets of London, and only the heart and lungs of The Machine. This restrictiveness not only lessens the immersion in these settings and smothers opportunities for environmental storytelling, but also makes the settings less believable, since everything you need to see is conveniently on the path, and nothing is behind the inconveniently placed objects. It also really hampers the chases, effectively reducing them to just running into the next room to get away, as if the chase were entirely on rails. Hell, sometimes you quite literally ARE on rails, it's that linear. It doesn't help that Mandus moves as if his lungs were filled with mustard gas, making a sense of stagnation set in very quickly. The story's ambitions and inherent dread are not done justice by this setting, trapped in amber, this place infested by axolotls, unlubricated in their assault, shackling it from the inside with its own steel fingers, with artistic beauty and atmosphere being an insufficient anodyne.

The pacing for this game is a mixed bag, and it's not even its own fault, by a technicality. The game will take about 4 hours to beat, which fits the story fine, but the blasted gameplay, no matter how you go about it, will make it feel off. If you go slowly, it will feel bloated by pointless filler, and if you rush through it, you will feel shortchanged. Whether you feel like there should be a burning of digital fat to redeem time wasted, or seek recompense for what seemed to be a swine sticking its snout in your lack of sunk cost, this machine's temo, trained by skillfully vivisecting high ideas and cerebral terrors, cannot stomach staring at the real engine of its existence; a result of the segregation of serpent and feather.

Negatives:

The manpigs are the main enemies of this game, and they are naught but a pale imitation, a life-bearing painting that exudes only death as would a forgery of the soul, of the enemies of old. Wretches are Servants, Engineers are Brutes, and the Failed Experiments are Kaernks. The only original one is the Tesla, an electric squealer. They may be more humanized and pitiable through smart environmental storytelling and lore than their orbspawn ancestors, but in terms of function, they can't even project the illusion of being a threat. Their AI is so dumb that they can only spot you when you are right in front of them and making eye contact; it takes 7 whole seconds for one to start chasing you, and only two seconds of hiding for them to give up; they are so slow, that even the miserably measured Mandus has to try to be caught by them; they can't bust down doors and are confined to individual rooms; they are restricted to certain routes to the point to where in certain areas, they won't chase you, and instead will run back to their patrol routes and then prepare to chase you. That's just comical. It also takes 5 hits for them to kill you, and even then, well.. that's a conversation for later. The Failed Experiments are largely in areas where it's impossible to fall in the water, which is again, simply laughable. The exception is again, the Tesla, which has a modicum of wit, strength, and is thus potentially scary. Too bad, then the competent one is only used twice at the end of the game, where it's too late to redeem any failed fear. The maw that these swine will glut is that of boredom and mediocrity, and they will do so with their own refuse.

I may have praised the art direction earlier, but other than that, the presentation for this game is not impressive at all. In fact, it's quite amateurish, averting, a snake-masked coyote wreathed in flowers. The visual fidelity, despite a 3-year jump, a higher budget, and an improved engine, is not any better than the first game, with the less touched-up areas of the map only exacerbating this. The draw distance, once miraculous, is now subpar, only being able to render about 10 feet in front of you. And then there is the lighting, which is genuinely awful. It's dark to the point where you can't see 2 feet in front of you, make that four feet when you have your lamp out, and the game goes out of its way to make light sources not emit light. This is so you don't notice the draw distance, like Silent Hill's fog, but in this case, it renders any good visuals and even a fair amount of the horror completely ineffective since you are unable to behold them. The only slightly cool thing they do with lighting is make your lamp flicker when manpigs are near, but that only serves as an annoyance to the other visuals and a safety net to already tepid horror. This means that none of the game's story, especially not the apocalyptic Act 3, can be done properly, instead being reduced to noise and a few harmless pigs. To become one with the unsightly dark, with long intervals of horrible reminders of potential beauty, it's not enjoyable or acceptable.

Well, it's time to bring up A Machine for Pig's quice-damned gameplay. Let's make it frice by saying it's pointlessly diluted and boring to the point where it hurts everything else. All you really do throughout the game is slowly walk around levels so linear that they might as well be on rails(again, sometimes this is literally the case), interact with only the things the game wants you to interact with, making immersion harder and a still-fun physics system wasted, occasionally solve puzzles even a pig could solve(maybe the mixing chamber and furnace are alright), and sometimes get chased by manpigs that are so easy to escape, they might as well not even be there. Even if you don't escape them, you can't die in this game. Okay, technically you can, but the game overcomplicates death so much that it's basically not even an issue most of the time. Oftentimes, if they do actually get you by some miracle(or if you let them get you out of pity), enemies simply knock you out and lock you up and won't even try to stop you from immediately escaping because of their dumb AI. Sometimes, they will throw you in a pit that has a convenient ladder hanging above it. On one occasion, getting caught allows you to straight up skip the one Failed Experiment chase in the entire game. Why? On the one or two occasions you can actually die, you are sent back one room. It's barely an inconvenience. You don't have any sort of resources or inventory to manage(your lamp is eternal and only serves to vaguely do its job and let you know enemies are nearby), and Mandus is no danger of insanity, meaning all you do is walk and are occasionally interrupted by menial tasks for 4 hours. This is, by any measure, boring, especially from something that promises more. This serpent is diseased, starved, rotten, and bled from neglect and false ideals. The worst part is the seemingly intentional ludonarrative dissonance this causes. The puzzles being simpleton material, the non-issue of death, the non-threatening swine, the factory being a literal roller coaster, it all detracts from the story's presentation in some way, making it hard to believe. The story was forced to devour the gameplay's cactus fruit, tricked into thinking it was for its own good, that in a video game, one could exist without the other. The coyote must've spoken those words, for the two fruits are core pillars, creatures in symbiosis, they need each other to achieve their full potential, it's the law of the medium. If this coyote is the architect, the architect who would segregate serpent and feathers out of principal, I refute him and his touch, his pointless kill. This absurd priesthood is his alone.

Despite its attempts at grand guignol glory, A Machine for Pigs largely fails at being scary. This game would have you believe that it takes a different approach to horror than the original: a smart move, and that its horror has four pillars to it: Gothic imagery by way of symbolism and pig masks that haunt you, body horror by way of the machine and its swine, stygian atmosphere, and dark philosophy to dwell on, of which there is a lot. All four of these pillars are undercut in some way. Gothic imagery and body horror don't work if you're blind, and most of the time, the lighting leaves you feeling like Helen Keller. Dark philosophy is good, and the game does it well, but that alone isn't enough in this medium; you need something more tangible than words. The atmosphere can't be maintained if you don't actually threaten the player, meaning it fizzles out, and that's if it had the chance to build up at all, which it can't due to ineffective jump scares. That's right, this game tries to have its cake and eat it by aping the original's brand of horror on top of having its own, and fails miserably. The jump scares are incompetently constructed and harm the tension, especially since this is how the pig masks are laughably used, and the fact that you can't see them half the time. The cosmic horror largely comes from the all-too-knowable Machine and the pig masks, which again, are more funny than scary. The chases are, again, more comedic than anything else due to how incompetent their construction and enemies are. The light games and sanity effects are just annoying smoke and mirrors with no substance behind them. To top it all off, death, the glue that holds horror together, is overthought to the point that nearly everything falls apart. When the flames of failure fade, you have a couple of creepy segments like the Tesla and the Church, but everything else provides a scare-free experience. The game thought that if it couldn't inspire fear, it would cause love, but in this genre, love and fear are one and the same, and so I hold no love for this horror craft.

Score: 6.1 out of 10

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has such immaculate narratives to share with thee, but a thoroughly weak and confusing technical side and a severe lack of horror mean that its words will fouled be. It will be thy Adam for some and a fallen angel for others.

Now go ahead and mock my flowery language. By all means, I deserve it.

Disclaimer: This review is meant to reflect my experience with the game. It is not a personal attack against you or the game's developers. If you disagree, that's fine, but please be civil about it.

Regardless of how much you want them to, memories never truly vanish; they only wash away into the fecund sepulchre that is the back of your mind. Hence why, before binging the Amnesia series on a whim, probably to catch up and indulge in longing, I remembered nothing about Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, aside from a few random details. As for why it was the details they were, I haven't the foggiest idea; it befuddles me still. I also don't know why I forgot as much as I did, since there are plenty of memorable things here, albeit definitely not all of them are good. The only Amnesia game not developed by Frictional Games, since other matter drew their eyes and toil(this was made by The Chinese Room), is full of wonders that one can scarcely imagine and blunders the likes of which you cannot conceive. But mine is not a painted mouth; it is one that calls upon Atlatl, dew, and droplets above, and out of the resulting batch of flowers, while the narrative blooms are beautiful beyond compare, the technical ones that made the first dark batch a beloved classic are neglected if not smothered in the earth entirely without a fertile replacement. A hauntingly beautiful sonnet rendered half illegible and repulsive to the touch by the blood-soaked parchment it's written on. A sequel defined by its limitations to an original that was defined by overcoming them.

Positives:

Starting with the part that most of you were feverishly anticipating, the story that A Machine for Pigs tells is simply exquisite. To say that writer Dan Pinchbeck has crafted one of the best stories that you can find in any horror game is only a small exaggeration. You are the damningly named Oswald Mandus(mayhaps you have a sister named Sarah Thustra). You have awoken from a vision of a machine that your fevered brain conjured up, remembering naught but your name, and things are, by your era's standard, queerish. Strange in that your bed is immersed in iron bars, stranger still that your darling sons, Edwin and Enoch, are missing. After the strangest phone call(sincerely, it is very strange) demanding sacrifice, your worst fears are confirmed: your children are lost to the machinery below, taken in the jaws of iron and eyes of inbred offal. You must play the role of Dante and save them. Without spoiling the mystery of how all of this came to be, what follows is a fin de siècle tale full of gothic madness, blasphemies of the body, societal nihilism, class angst of the hypocritical kind, Aztec symbolism, concerns involving industrial ethics and lack thereof, and a healthy dose of fatalism. What I just divulged is hardly even a quarter of what the game is trying to explore here; it's an incredibly dense narrative that will make you look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, and make you conclude that telling the difference is nigh impossible. Oh, and in case you were curious as to whether The Dark Descent is required reading for this one, there is a vague connection between the two games, a hereditary one, but it's very loose, and you don't necessarily need to know about it. The story is told via notes, phonograph recordings, flashbacks, and various monologues, given in a Nolanesque way. All of these methods work very well, especially the monologues. Dan Pinchbeck is a master at writing monologues, and here, he's at the top of his game, especially the final one, which might be one of the best in gaming. It's also not often that I praise a game for its prose, but in this case, the way notes and dialogue are written here is beautiful. Every sentence is full of poetry, rich language, symbolism, and multiple meanings, with not a single one being superfluous. It's like you're reading one of the gothic classics of yore. I suppose I could take some petty prods at some elements and say that some of the story and themes are a bit too closely tied to vague symbolism to have their full effect or that the pig metaphors are overwrought and pretentious at times, but those, as I said, are petty. Nitpicks to an otherwise impeccable annal, a flawless batch of feathers.

Like fine art, it takes time to appreciate it, but the art direction in this game is superb. Everything in it, from the environment to the decorations, from the inhabitants to the butchered remains, from the machine's depths to the streets of London, all of it is rendered in a heavily gothic style and color palette. The level of detail the game tries to implement, even in the slightest, is quite admirable. It seems as if a coyote-headed primate has touched all of the game's textures with his paws; the large machinery, the desks, the doors, the paintings, even the smallest of switches. It is most prevalent in Mandus's Mansion and the chemical mixing chamber. The loading screens being stylized with fancy blueprints is also a nice touch, and a bow on this gothic box.

The largest improvement from the original, aside from the story, comes from the character models. While this is admittedly partly because there aren't that many, just the manpigs, Edwin, Enoch, and the odd London citizen here and there. Those models look great though, the manpigs' forms are filthy types; horrid even to the slightest resemblance. Edwin and Enoch are the perfect combination of goodly and ghastly, and the other citizens, while not as well rendered as the others, do their job well enough, and to be fair, you're not supposed to see those swine for more than half a second(unless you're me). The fact that they are all rendered in the game's gloriously gothic art style is incredible generosity on top of it all.

The voice acting is also a substantial upgrade from the original, which was situationally good, to here, which is consistently great. All of the actors do a great job at bringing these characters to life. Whether it's Mandus's delusions, the Engineer's bleak poetry, Professor A's perverted filial piety for the lower classes, or The Machine's Napoleon complex, no quirk is left unexplored. I'll give MVA to Mark Roper(Robert Zemeckis diehard will know him) for pulling double duty as both Professor A and The Machine. He portrays the subtle, blind arrogance of the bourgeoisie and the roar of a demon, long caged, with equal fervor. A true Jade Snail turn.

The sound design is pretty incredible for the most part. The background audio is rich, visceral, and full of layers and textures that work well together. The echoes and clangs of machinery, the crackle of electricity, the stink of the Victorian London air quality that you can practically feel on your skin, the reverb of the church, and the marvelous mayhem of Act 3 are all amazing. The object audio is still intact: the ringing of wooden phones, the creaking doors and drawers, the shattering of glass, thrown objects make the right noises, and even the smallest of switches are up to par. The voice audio is crisp and really lets the spoken lines shine. The humans and their vocalized offal, the static in the recordings, the manpigs, children of man and metal, what music they all make! There are a couple of downsides; the mixing is a little off(the spoken dialogue is quiet and tends to get drowned out), it doesn't have the same rawness and assaultive nature as Dark Descent, and the same great sound is rarely used for horror purposes. If you are scared by anything purely audio-related, it's likely coincidental. However, the likely outcome is that you will be too enraptured by this Blood Metal orchestral to notice or care.

Mixed:

The soundtrack is in a very unfortunate position. On a technical level, composer Jessica Curry(fun fact: she is married to Pinchbeck and was co-head of the studio for a while) has done an excellent job. Her orchestral score, full of strings, ivory, and masterful choirs, is haunting, beautiful, and surprisingly grand for a horror game like this. Tracks like "New Year's Eve", "The Church", "Christ Have Mercy", "Mors Praematura", and "Mandus" are exemplary of these qualities. The main motif found in "Mandus Awakes" is also oddly reminiscent of Hans Zimmer's Dune score. The ambient tracks like "Compound X" and "Clockwork Soul" have these same perks and also include an eerie metallic sound throughout them. All of it sounds like the spider monkey has breathed them into existence purely for this story. The problem is that none of it is taken advantage of. With the exception of "New Year's Eve", which is the main menu theme, and "The Church", which is played... well... you can guess, all of the tracks listed above, and all of the tracks I didn't list for brevity's sake are crammed into Act 3. The ambient tracks are even more wasted because of their dynamic implementation. The ambient tracks are played only when you are doing a puzzle, watching the fruits of a solved puzzle, are near something that wants you dead, or are being chased by that thing, the music varying in intensity depending on the scenario. Anyone familiar with this game's bastard gameplay will know that this means the ambient tracks play at a frequency of almost never. This means that 80% of the game is as silent as Florence Foster Jenkins's greatest hits album. The last 20% of the game may be heaven on the ears, but it really didn't have to be this way.

The characters that inhabit this cactus fruit basket are also in an awkward position, but this time, it's by design. On paper, most of the characters are great. You have Oswald Mandus, fatalistic inventor, messianic butcher, and charitable misanthrope supreme, the cynical, eccentric, and poetry-obsessed Engineer, the barely disguised bourgeois called Professor A, and The Machine, a sentient thing. Or maybe quarter-sentient is a better description, since it knows only hate. Even the manpigs, malicious from their misery, are given personality behind iron bars. The downsides start with Oswald's family: Edwin and Enoch are blank shells and are only there for plot reasons, and Lilibeth(or just Lily, if you prefer)is only there to be associated with the feathered bitch through childbirth, because we all know that the oppressed are interesting only in death. The main problem with these characters is that this story makes the same narrative choice that doomed Little Hope; the plot events and narrative structure ultimately render all but one character completely pointless. Unlike Little Hope, which did this through incompetence, A Machine for Pigs does so intentionally for character study purposes. The one character who does end up mattering is Oswald, the best character in the game, so at least there's that. However, the fact remains that Pinchbeck wondered if this story would be lovelier when you are alone, and in that wondering, he rendered the game's heart cold, shackled its jaws in ice, and crusted its eyes with frost. Thus, the story and characters could reach perfection.

Mandus's Meatpacking Factory, the place where this horror goes down, is a vast well of missed potential. As stated above, it all looks great. Mandus's hypocritical and man-whorish mansion, the offal-inducing streets of London, and the factory where the machine is, which is almost alive with how organized, oiled, and intricate its various parts are. All of them have a solid, spooky atmosphere as well. It's too bad that you can't explore any of it. This game is Final Fantasy XIII levels of linear, and while it's not as bad a thing here as it is in Final Fantasy XIII, it's still a hindrance. You only get to see some of the mansion, select parts of the factory, only a few streets of London, and only the heart and lungs of The Machine. This restrictiveness not only lessens the immersion in these settings and smothers opportunities for environmental storytelling, but also makes the settings less believable, since everything you need to see is conveniently on the path, and nothing is behind the inconveniently placed objects. It also really hampers the chases, effectively reducing them to just running into the next room to get away, as if the chase were entirely on rails. Hell, sometimes you quite literally ARE on rails, it's that linear. It doesn't help that Mandus moves as if his lungs were filled with mustard gas, making a sense of stagnation set in very quickly. The story's ambitions and inherent dread are not done justice by this setting, trapped in amber, this place infested by axolotls, unlubricated in their assault, shackling it from the inside with its own steel fingers, with artistic beauty and atmosphere being an insufficient anodyne.

The pacing for this game is a mixed bag, and it's not even its own fault, by a technicality. The game will take about 4 hours to beat, which fits the story fine, but the blasted gameplay, no matter how you go about it, will make it feel off. If you go slowly, it will feel bloated by pointless filler, and if you rush through it, you will feel shortchanged. Whether you feel like there should be a burning of digital fat to redeem time wasted, or seek recompense for what seemed to be a swine sticking its snout in your lack of sunk cost, this machine's temo, trained by skillfully vivisecting high ideas and cerebral terrors, cannot stomach staring at the real engine of its existence; a result of the segregation of serpent and feather.

Negatives:

The manpigs are the main enemies of this game, and they are naught but a pale imitation, a life-bearing painting that exudes only death as would a forgery of the soul, of the enemies of old. Wretches are Servants, Engineers are Brutes, and the Failed Experiments are Kaernks. The only original one is the Tesla, an electric squealer. They may be more humanized and pitiable through smart environmental storytelling and lore than their orbspawn ancestors, but in terms of function, they can't even project the illusion of being a threat. Their AI is so dumb that they can only spot you when you are right in front of them and making eye contact; it takes 7 whole seconds for one to start chasing you, and only two seconds of hiding for them to give up; they are so slow, that even the miserably measured Mandus has to try to be caught by them; they can't bust down doors and are confined to individual rooms; they are restricted to certain routes to the point to where in certain areas, they won't chase you, and instead will run back to their patrol routes and then prepare to chase you. That's just comical. It also takes 5 hits for them to kill you, and even then, well.. that's a conversation for later. The Failed Experiments are largely in areas where it's impossible to fall in the water, which is again, simply laughable. The exception is again, the Tesla, which has a modicum of wit, strength, and is thus potentially scary. Too bad, then the competent one is only used twice at the end of the game, where it's too late to redeem any failed fear. The maw that these swine will glut is that of boredom and mediocrity, and they will do so with their own refuse.

I may have praised the art direction earlier, but other than that, the presentation for this game is not impressive at all. In fact, it's quite amateurish, averting, a snake-masked coyote wreathed in flowers. The visual fidelity, despite a 3-year jump, a higher budget, and an improved engine, is not any better than the first game, with the less touched-up areas of the map only exacerbating this. The draw distance, once miraculous, is now subpar, only being able to render about 10 feet in front of you. And then there is the lighting, which is genuinely awful. It's dark to the point where you can't see 2 feet in front of you, make that four feet when you have your lamp out, and the game goes out of its way to make light sources not emit light. This is so you don't notice the draw distance, like Silent Hill's fog, but in this case, it renders any good visuals and even a fair amount of the horror completely ineffective since you are unable to behold them. The only slightly cool thing they do with lighting is make your lamp flicker when manpigs are near, but that only serves as an annoyance to the other visuals and a safety net to already tepid horror. This means that none of the game's story, especially not the apocalyptic Act 3, can be done properly, instead being reduced to noise and a few harmless pigs. To become one with the unsightly dark, with long intervals of horrible reminders of potential beauty, it's not enjoyable or acceptable.

Well, it's time to bring up A Machine for Pig's quice-damned gameplay. Let's make it frice by saying it's pointlessly diluted and boring to the point where it hurts everything else. All you really do throughout the game is slowly walk around levels so linear that they might as well be on rails(again, sometimes this is literally the case), interact with only the things the game wants you to interact with, making immersion harder and a still-fun physics system wasted, occasionally solve puzzles even a pig could solve(maybe the mixing chamber and furnace are alright), and sometimes get chased by manpigs that are so easy to escape, they might as well not even be there. Even if you don't escape them, you can't die in this game. Okay, technically you can, but the game overcomplicates death so much that it's basically not even an issue most of the time. Oftentimes, if they do actually get you by some miracle(or if you let them get you out of pity), enemies simply knock you out and lock you up and won't even try to stop you from immediately escaping because of their dumb AI. Sometimes, they will throw you in a pit that has a convenient ladder hanging above it. On one occasion, getting caught allows you to straight up skip the one Failed Experiment chase in the entire game. Why? On the one or two occasions you can actually die, you are sent back one room. It's barely an inconvenience. You don't have any sort of resources or inventory to manage(your lamp is eternal and only serves to vaguely do its job and let you know enemies are nearby), and Mandus is no danger of insanity, meaning all you do is walk and are occasionally interrupted by menial tasks for 4 hours. This is, by any measure, boring, especially from something that promises more. This serpent is diseased, starved, rotten, and bled from neglect and false ideals. The worst part is the seemingly intentional ludonarrative dissonance this causes. The puzzles being simpleton material, the non-issue of death, the non-threatening swine, the factory being a literal roller coaster, it all detracts from the story's presentation in some way, making it hard to believe. The story was forced to devour the gameplay's cactus fruit, tricked into thinking it was for its own good, that in a video game, one could exist without the other. The coyote must've spoken those words, for the two fruits are core pillars, creatures in symbiosis, they need each other to achieve their full potential, it's the law of the medium. If this coyote is the architect, the architect who would segregate serpent and feathers out of principal, I refute him and his touch, his pointless kill. This absurd priesthood is his alone.

Despite its attempts at grand guignol glory, A Machine for Pigs largely fails at being scary. This game would have you believe that it takes a different approach to horror than the original: a smart move, and that its horror has four pillars to it: Gothic imagery by way of symbolism and pig masks that haunt you, body horror by way of the machine and its swine, stygian atmosphere, and dark philosophy to dwell on, of which there is a lot. All four of these pillars are undercut in some way. Gothic imagery and body horror don't work if you're blind, and most of the time, the lighting leaves you feeling like Helen Keller. Dark philosophy is good, and the game does it well, but that alone isn't enough in this medium; you need something more tangible than words. The atmosphere can't be maintained if you don't actually threaten the player, meaning it fizzles out, and that's if it had the chance to build up at all, which it can't due to ineffective jump scares. That's right, this game tries to have its cake and eat it by aping the original's brand of horror on top of having its own, and fails miserably. The jump scares are incompetently constructed and harm the tension, especially since this is how the pig masks are laughably used, and the fact that you can't see them half the time. The cosmic horror largely comes from the all-too-knowable Machine and the pig masks, which again, are more funny than scary. The chases are, again, more comedic than anything else due to how incompetent their construction and enemies are. The light games and sanity effects are just annoying smoke and mirrors with no substance behind them. To top it all off, death, the glue that holds horror together, is overthought to the point that nearly everything falls apart. When the flames of failure fade, you have a couple of creepy segments like the Tesla and the Church, but everything else provides a scare-free experience. The game thought that if it couldn't inspire fear, it would cause love, but in this genre, love and fear are one and the same, and so I hold no love for this horror craft.

Score: 6.1 out of 10

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has such immaculate narratives to share with thee, but a thoroughly weak and confusing technical side and a severe lack of horror mean that its words will fouled be. It will be thy Adam for some and a fallen angel for others.

Now go ahead and mock my flowery language. By all means, I deserve it.

Once, I dreamt I played the most confusing 90's RPG I'd ever encountered. I forgot myself and knew only the conflicting emotions of playing that confusing game. Then I awoke, and I was mysel- wait... that wasn't a dream, I just played Persona 1. Sure felt like I was dreaming, though. Anyway, most people, when talking about the series or Atlus in general, tend to leave the first two games out of the conversation. In this case, I can kind of understand why; it certainly hasn't aged the best, has weird pacing and a weirder tonal clash, but I'd be lying if there wasn't some appeal to this. From some surprisingly decent writing to some fun combat and a well-executed acid trip vibe, Persona 1 has its moments if you're willing to stick through it.

One more thing: I'm using the PSP version for this and don't have access to the original, so I can't compare the two and may include an open-ended part in the review. Maybe some changes between versions explain some of my praises or gripes.

Positives:

Presentation-wise, the game is very surreal, and I kind of like it. Admittedly, this is largely due to the art direction. The backgrounds in battle, the weird hallways in the dungeons, the overhead view of Mikage-Cho, the demons and personas used in battle that look like they've been pulled from 108 different mythologies, half of which I haven't even heard of, or the character portraits that look like a memory that's only 90% remembered, they contribute to the trippy vibe this game has. It's also surprisingly good at portraying horror, which the game does take advantage of, particularly in its third act. The graphical prowess isn't anything special; it's about late PS1-early PS2 level, which is most notable in the dungeons and in the occasional CGI cutscene that pops up; Nothing Square-level, but it works just fine for the time, I guess, even if it doesn't hold up now. As for performance, there aren't any real problems with the frame rate or stability, so the game is smooth sailing on that front.

The characters are surprisingly good, for the most part. No one is downright unlikable, unless they are meant to be so; everyone has their quirks and has at least something to contribute to the story, ranging from assuming you stop to talk to them. Standouts include Kei/Nate, a stoic rich kid who's the voice of reason, Maki/Mary, a cheerful girl whose memories would be a field day for the Wright Anything Agency, Eriko/Elly, a popular kid who is obsessed with the occult, Philemon, a masked guardian angel of sorts that frequently appears as a golden butterfly, and Reiji/Chris, a social outcast with serious family issues. Most of the other characters are at least alright, with the only real missteps being Masao/Mark, the best bud archetype that has a crush on Maki, who is mostly there to be the subject of monkey jokes, and Hidehiko/Brown, some jerk with an ego the size of a town who just acts melodramatic all the time. At least he's fun to voice. The lack of noticeable arcs/development and Krew team synergy(they don't work as well as a group as they do individually) keeps them from being amazing, and is especially noticeable in characters like Ayase/Alana, the bitchy pretty girl, and the villain, Kandori, a nihilistic CEO with a god complex, who have heel-face turns that feel very abrupt if you don't exhaust the dialogue. The best character is technically Maki, seeing how she has the most fleshed-out backstory and complex characterization, but my favorite turned out to be Kei.

The combat itself is honestly pretty fun and is not too different from the games to come. You still have melee weapons, guns, armor, personas that you can fight with, as well as weaknesses and resistances to keep track of/exploit, even if in this game, weaknesses just cause more damage. The main differences that got removed are that, in a way, everyone is a wild card(each party member can have 3 personas) and the grid system. Fights happen on a grid that combatants(you and the demons) must position themselves on, and you'll have to do so strategically to avoid unnecessary group damage and maximize how many of your attacks hit. For example, Maki, who uses bows, is better suited to be in the back of the grid, while Masao, who has an axe and a shotgun, is best put up front. Combine this with everyone having three personas and being able to select what stats to increase when you level up, and you have practically infinite possibilities for how you structure your team. Persona fusion is pretty simple: you can add an item that can increase stats, grant special moves, or change the fusion entirely, and there can be mistakes. There are a couple of problems, such as complexity for the sake of complexity(seriously, this game did not need 28 different damage types), having only 3 types of SP items, two of which are really weak, and the only good one, the soma is only available through grinding, which can really drag boss fights, and the experience system, which awards differing amounts of EXP to party members based on the damage they dealt and the demons they killed, awards nothing to dead party members, and only levels up your personas if you use them in battle. This system will, not can, WILL turn into a rich get richer simulator, and someone is getting left in the dust. These aren't enough to offset some otherwise fun battles that are overall moderate in difficulty.

The atmosphere is half of what gives this game its acid-trippy charm that feels almost Lynchian at times, which is odd, because I'm partly convinced it's done by accident. The surreal and varied visuals, the demons, the reality-bending, the dimensional hopping, the sometimes hilarious attempts at psychological depth/thematic exploration, teenagers being teenagers, a darker final act, music that doesn't fit at all, and random splashes of surprisingly effective horror make you feel like you're having a trip, and sometimes it goes bad. I mean, how else do you describe a game where you go from chasing down an evil CEO who's trying to achieve godhood to fighting a giant rat tank that a little girl sicced on you in the span of only one level, and you save your progress by writing on pink talking trees?

The character designs are pretty good as well. Each of the characters looks distinct, pleasing to the eye(as pleasing as PS1 models can be), and fitting to their personalities. The designs of the demons and personas are also stellar, fitting the weird and at times creepy atmosphere, with the final boss in particular being absolute nightmare fuel. As for standouts, Yukino/Yuki, Kei, Naoya, and Reiji are pretty good among the human characters, while the succubi, angels, God Kandori, and Tesso are quite memorable among the monsters.

Mixed:

The music, by series composer Shoji Meguro, who, fun fact, also directed this game(the PSP version, anyhow. That still makes him a bonafide Japanese John Carpenter), is in a bit of an awkward spot. The score itself isn't bad, not even close; there are several good tracks throughout, including "School Days", "A Lone Prayer", "Let Butterflies Spread Until the Dawn", "Battle with Tesso", "Bloody Destiny", "Pandora, The Last Battle", and of course, introducing the classic that is "Aria of the Soul." Those are all bangers and classic Meguro. The problem is that they don't fit the tone the game is going for at all (aside from Aria, of course; that song can fit anywhere). For all of the game's attempts at setting up a dark, unnerving, and sometimes horrifying psychological thriller of an RPG, a pop song or piece of jazz comes in to screw up the mood. The weird part is that this might be a version-specific issue, because there are more fitting tracks in dungeons, like "Avidia World", "The Girl in Black", "Paranormal Phenomena", "Thanatos Tower", and the epic "Night Queen" that are just as good. So what you're left with are songs that are great on their own, but a confusing mess when meshed together.

The story had the potential to be as good as the characters, but it has something holding it back. The plot also has two different routes: SEBEC, the main one, and Snow Queen. I'll be talking about the former here. The SEBEC route starts off with Naoya(The Protagonist) and his friends test out a local rumor by playing a fortune-telling game, only to find out the rumor is real, and now demons are attacking the town, the local megacorp is trying to open a dimensional rift, your friend that was hospitalized, and you just saw bed ridden today is up and about while missing memories she should have and possessing memories she shouldn't, and reality is being torn asunder- god dammit, again? Let me check... yeah, it's Monday in JRPGaea. The best way to describe the SEBEC plot is to call it Chrono Cross on acid with some last-minute rewrites from David Lynch. The story has quite a lot of thematic and idea through lines with the rest of the series, like Jungian Psychology, Nihilism vs Optimism, a rather negative view of godhood, facing your demons, human nature, dreams vs reality, and of course, the power of friendship. It's also very heavy on metaphors and symbolism. All of this sounds awesome on paper, but there are some key problems that keep it from being so. First, is that none of its ideas get enough time to marinate. The same goes for its plot points and characters, so they rarely have the impact they need until Act 3, when things get genuinely great. Second, the pacing drags a bit due to the amount of grinding you have to do, so some of the moments can lose their impact because of that. That's more a fault of the gameplay than the story, though; the 30-hour story otherwise goes by fine. The third and biggest problem is that this story suffers from the same faulty narrative framing that plagues Final Fantasy XII. To put it simply, Naoya is the Vaan to Maki's Princess Ashe. Following Maki would've been way more interesting than the player Avatar we got. But still, if you can sit through this main plot, there's certainly good stuff to find here, including some good endings(there are 2 of them, one happy and one bleak, depending on how you do on a certain questionnaire), and some absolutely batshit plot twists that lend to the acid-trip vibe perfectly.

I don't really have much to say about the sound design. It's perfectly serviceable, with no major highlights or weaknesses. I guess the sound of personas being summoned is pretty cool, but that's about it. The sound is sound.

The dungeon-crawling aspect is also pretty standard. You walk around randomly generated dungeons with various themes(one of which is the sea of souls, by the by), battling enemies, finding treasure that is sometimes booby-trapped, and hoping you find save, healing rooms, or even the Velvet Room along the way. That's right, the Velvet Room, which has its default theme this time(it's just a room)that can be randomly generated in dungeons in this one, mostly because there are points where you won't have access to the mall where it's actually at. The game will try to throw in various tiles that only let you move in one direction, ones that spin you around, ones that are unstable, and cause you to fall through the floor, dark rooms that make you feel your way around, puzzle switch tiles, and trap tiles that hurt you. There is also side content, like gambling and an optional dungeon, which are also alright, even if the latter is barred until new game + for some reason. There are also some choices you can make throughout the game, and if you make the choices a good person would, you'll unlock the ultimate personas for each character. The more you get right, the more you unlock. You can get special items from the former, which is cool, if you're okay with grinding. None of it evolves enough to be remarkable, so by the end of the game, you'll be a bit weary about it. But, eh, what were you expecting from a 90's dungeon crawler?

The game also has a little bit of voice acting. It consists of battle cries from your party members and talking in some of the animated cutscenes. The battle cries are passable, but aside from Philemon, the voice work in the cutscenes is pretty bad. This isn't a case of being spoiled by the Arems, the VAs in the cutscenes either didn't care or had no direction at all. I'll give MVA to Travis Willingham as Philemon, since he has the most to do and consistently does an acceptable job. Overall, though, voice work is so rare in this game that any shortcomings are pretty negligible.

Negatives:

The boss fights in this game are pretty lame for the most part. With the exception of Tesso and Kandori, which are passable, the rest are either way too easy and straightforward, rarely taking advantage of the game's immense combat system. The worst, unfortunately, are the final bosses of each route, which are really frustrating purely due to the absurd level jump from the final dungeon(SEBEC route goes from level 70 to 99 while you're probably level 65 on your first play through, while Snow Queen has a ludicrous 45 to 99 jump while you're probably around lvl 45), and their high HP count. The lack of good SP items means you will run out of persona usage without a good way to replenish it, and the fights will drag on forever, or until they use their ultimate on you twice. If you didn't grind somas and have Amen Ra, you're basically screwed, and even if you do, that's about 40 minutes of your time down the drain per attempt.

Naoya Toudou... what a waste of space you are. He's the main protagonist and a player avatar in its purest and worst form. He can't interact with characters in any meaningful way, says absolutely nothing, and is overall a black hole of narrative investment and charisma that Maki could've filled in just fine. This is especially clear since there are no social links in this game, but hindsight is 20/20.

This game has all of the old-school RPG tropes that don't hold up today. Doesn't bother to develop characters or plot beyond the bare minimum? Check. Ridiculously grindy? Check. No tutorials to explain complex systems, where you're basically thrown in the deep end? Check. Level jumps to compensate for low difficulty? Check. Padding the runtime out with a stupidly high encounter rate? Fucking hell, check, it's ridiculous even for the time. All of this can make the game hard to get into.

Snow Queen Quest sucks. It's a route B with a barebones plot about a cursed theatre mask that kills whoever wears it which has nothing interesting going for it, no character work, a 30-hour runtime where 90% of that is grinding, a frustrating final boss that more or less comes down to out-brute forcing it(and grinding for 10 hours), and endings so hollow, that the mirror shards that determine which one you get(you need at least 8 of 12 to get the good ending) feel not only optional, but repellent, since at least you don't have to fight the final boss in the bad ending. I guess it does have a very important piece of series lore and explains an event in the SEBEC route that isn't explained elsewhere, but other than that, do not engage.

Score: 6.4 out of 10

Time has been cruel to Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, and its boss fights and weird narrative design choices crueler still, but the series completionists and JRPG die-hards that stick around will find a trip of a story, ambitious combat, and a fun cast of characters to admire. If you feel like legally going to the moon, so to speak, give it a shot.

Now...>!Noisort Ralucitset!!!!<