Disappointed with AAMFP

[padawan]

I'm firmly in the "disappointed" camp, for most of the reasons that can be read here and elsewhere on the internet
(http://jacobalbano.com/2013/09/disappoin...-for-pigs/ ). And none of the arguments of the fans of the game make much sense to me either. Yes, I read all the notes, but using that much text in a videogame is just poor story-telling-technique. Really, if the game had started with a long letter describing everything in the notes, followed by a rapid decent by elevator to the hearth of the machine (why isn't there a direct way to go there? Major plothole!), some valve-turning and then the ending, would the game experience really be different at all? The whole game could and should have been only 30 minutes long and it would have been a better game for it.
The pigmen-monsters could just as well have been omitted, they added nothing to the experience, sorry. If they had only been shown in their holding-cells I might have felt some genuine pity, but now it just felt fake. The whole middle part of the game was basically just a very long maze, all in the dark, so I couldn't really make out the details that supposedly are there.

I really, really tried to experience this game with an open mind, trying to immerge myself. But I never could. I couldn't be bothered with the succes or failure of Mandus and would have killed him (and let the machine win) if I could have.

But what is really strange to me, is that the whole game of AaMfP seems to fly in the face of everything I read on the FG dev blog. I read the blog with great interest, and really liked the high-level analysis there. All these thoughts of techniques to aid immersion, I don't see them back in AaMfP. The "puzzles" in AaMfP are precise the opposite of what the devs seemed to be talking about in the blog: they were annoying, partly because they were so stupidly simple, partly because I didn't experience any logical connection with them and the main storyline and therefore broke immersion.

There was no illusion of freedom, so immersion was broken. There were no choices, so there were no complex emotions or ambiguity, and no identification with the protagonist.
Because there was no inventory, I walked around with the few items that I could pick up squarely in the middle of my screen, because I new I would need them soon. That is exactly not what I do in real life: walking around with stretched arms with some item in it, because I know I will need it in the next room. So at first I couldn't make out the pig on the cross in the church, because, the candle I was holding blocked the view. Bad, bad, bad technique.

And why was there not enough light in the rooms where there were big, very big lamps? Everything was just shadow, and not in the good way (yes, I mean like TDD and Penumbra did it), but it left me with the feeling that the devs couldn't be bothered with letting me really see the world.

And to those who seem to like the story (which I found very cliche) I say: go to the library and read a book. Books cannot be beaten if you want a story told by reading. A game is a different medium and the stenghts and weaknesses should be used as much as possible. I thought from the developers blog that they are thinking hard about what that means, but apperently not. I'm still feeling uncomfortable when I think about Red and the incinerator. Still feel dread at the thought of the torture-apparatus in TDD. I remember well the voice in TDD saying "I should have shaprened the saw". But I'm sorry to say that AaMfP just left me cold, and I don't get why FG failed so spectacular with this game.