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You know what, I should review Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
(SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T PLAYED THE GAME)
I'm admittedly one of the people who thinks Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is okay for what it is, but that's not to say I don't have my criticisms. The Chinese Room did some pretty good things with it that many people overlooked, and a lot of the game-play elements of this game carry over into SOMA, so I suspect Frictional Games themselves also saw what The Chinese Room did well.
CORE GAME-PLAY:
I find the fact that there is no inventory, sanity meter, or resources to manage oddly refreshing, and the linear progression makes a nice change from the quazi-open-world exploration in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and all of the puzzles center around physical objects in the environment that you can move around or interact with, which allows the experience to focus on immersing the player in the world around them, and you cannot move many objects aside from puzzle-related objects and things that are obviously useless to progression, such as chairs, which helps prevent the player from getting confused about what's important and what isn't. I don't have a lot to say about the game-play aside from this, it's honestly pretty solid.
THE ENEMIES:
Before I get into my gripe with the way the manpig enemies were used, I want to talk about their visual design, which is, honestly, pretty alright, they are scary looking which is the ultimate goal when creating a monster for a horror game, I personally like the Tesla pig best, it's actually badass looking. The way the manpigs were used was hit or miss for me, though. I know a lot of people were disappointed with the way the enemies were utilized in this game, and I do agree that they ruined them when they showed them all off in a sympathetic way in the holding cells, but for the entire stretch of the game before this, they had a terrifying presence, and I'd go as far as to say that this game managed to scare me more on my first play-through than The Dark Descent, especially in the catacombs beneath the church, that is high-key my favorite level of this game!
STORY AND CHARACTERS:
Mandus as a protagonist is pretty forgettable, in all honesty. The "twist" that his sons, Edwin and Enoch, are dead can be seen coming right from the start of the game, and when he realizes he's killed them, and moreover unleashed a mechanical murder-machine to destroy humanity in droves, it doesn't feel very genuine because, again, you see it coming from a mile off. The Machine, however, as a main antagonist, is actually quite good in my opinion. As far as I understand, Mandus' butcher business was failing, and he wanted to expand it by creating machines to automate his work, and the bank wouldn't give him the loans he needed to get this done, so he instead tracked down an Orb in Mexico, I'm guessing with the hope that he could sell it for enough money to build his machines, but the Orb gave him a glimpse of the horrors of the 20th century, including his sons being killed during the Battle of the Somme in WW1, and he instead sacrificed his children on the steps of the temple, and then set about to automate human sacrifice under a misguided hope that it could somehow prevent it all from happening. The Machine is the angry side of Mandus' personality, which he used the Orb to remove and infuse into the machines he'd built, so The Machine is actually the evil half of Mandus, and Mandus is the half that could never believe what he'd done, thus upon awakening, Mandus had no recollection of what had happened. The Machine is obviously highly intelligent and self-sufficient, as evidenced by how it manipulates Mandus, tricking him into repairing it. After Mandus repairs the machine, he realizes that he's killed his children, and what The Machine plans to do, and once again descends into the core as the new century looms ever closer to destroy what he has created once and for all, killing himself in the process to escape the oncoming slaughter that was the 20th century.
SOUNDS AND VISUAL DESIGN:
I lowkey like the sfx in this game the best out of the entire Amnesia series! The footsteps are satisfying to listen to and never sound repetitive, the monster sounds are terrifying, and the way the sounds are mixed into the environment is an absolute masterpiece. The soundtrack for this game is also really good, especially the piece towards the end of the game when the Machine monologues to Mandus about the horrors it's been shown that will happen during the 20th century, and the VA's delivery of this dialogue along with the backing track is a powerful combination that serves as one of the more memorable parts of this game. As far as visual design goes, it's generally okay, many of the assets came from Amnesia: the Dark Descent, and the new assets they added are of similar quality, not a whole lot else to say. The only thing visually about this game I want to criticize is that in many of the areas there is a thick blue fog which I don't like the look of, although I found a post on the Amnesia subreddit a few months ago that suggests it was a bug from the start, but this only makes it worse because the devs have left such a bad visual bug in the game this entire time, which really bugs me as a game developer myself, if you take your craft seriously you treat these types of things as your duty to fix, I'm sorry.
Overall I'd probably give Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs a 6/10, it's a good game, but it could be a whole lot better in many ways. Is it worth the 20 dollars you'd spend? I'd say it is, but don't expect it to be the same way as The Dark Descent.