AMFP Member Review Thread

[Dikiyoba]

So I'm not entirely sure why I wrote this hugemassive review, and have now registered to post it. Eh. Enjoy, I guess.

Overall
I played A Machine for Pigs twice. I was pretty disappointed by it. It was better than Dear Esther (though this is not hard), but a lot worse than The Dark Descent and Penumbra: Overture (the other Frictional Games titles I’ve played). I appreciated the graphics, the sounds, and the atmosphere, but disliked the gameplay and the story. Plus, I ran across multiple bugs. There are a couple of good moments, but overall it’s not worth playing. 5/10

Engine

Spoiler below!

Performance
I have a laptop that is a couple of years old now, and A Machine for Pigs ran pretty well on it. The maps took a fairly long time to load, but once they were loaded the game ran smoothly on medium graphics. I could have had it on high graphics (and did for about half of my first playthrough), had I been willing to put up with the occasional moments of slowdown and lag. I did not encounter any bugs as far as the engine and performance went.

Graphics
The game is too dark (or has too many filters on it), even with the lantern (which spends half its time flickering due to pigmen anyway). The darkness worked for The Dark Descent, where it tied into the interface and main themes. Here, it’s just a hindrance. I spent far too long wandering in circles in the piston room. Some of the motifs—the paintings, the pig heads—are overdone. (I really like the idea of the pig heads, but they’re too common.) The heart loading screen is pretty, but too obvious. I would have liked to see a pig diagram with all the cuts labeled, or something else directly related to a slaughterhouse. The human models I wasn’t too impressed with. The twins were okay. The naked men were silly (they worked in Amnesia, but not here). The body parts looked more like plastic or rubber than flesh. There was a clothed man in a top hat, but he was barely used. On the other hand, the individual zone loading screens and entire factory map were good, as was the pigmen models (not scary, but cool), and animations (the animations were a bit short, but what can you do?). I just wish I had been able to get a better look at some of the animations, since they were usually hidden behind doors or fences. The graininess that appeared whenever I got injured was irritating; it’s hard enough to see with the darkness and red mist without adding more difficulty to it. Overall, the graphics were fine: not as pretty as Dear Esther, and just a hair below The Dark Descent.

Sounds and Music
Overall, the sounds and music are very good. A few sounds or music sequences were either too loud (the organ music in the church) or too soft (a lot of the atmospheric voices), but that’s a minor quibble. The terror meter music wasn’t scary the way The Dark Descent’s terror meter was, but it was distinctive and obvious enough to know something was after you. I loved the end credits song. The voice acting was good, one of the only things improved upon from The Dark Descent. It was realistic, and the only reason I felt any empathy for Oswald, the Professor, and the machine.

Interface
The interface is tolerable, but not great. The controls are as they were in The Dark Descent (and indeed Penumbra: Overture), and while they work, movement is not quite as smooth as it could be. The fact that I could barely jump sucked, which I don’t remember happening in The Dark Descent. Plus, this game doesn’t really need leaning. I was really excited about not needing oil for my lantern, and neutral about the lack of inventory. I didn’t really miss it, but it might have made for better puzzles or a less linear game, plus I missed not being able to heal. Also, carrying the coal for the furnaces in the piston room was tedious. The slowed movement whenever a voiceover or event happened was highly annoying, especially whenever I had to replay zones due to bugs. So, too, was the painfully slow movement on ladders. I soon resorted to just jumping down whenever I could. The fact that only a few items are intractable is unfortunate. It makes puzzles very obvious, ruins immersion, and I missed being able to goof around with all those objects. I would be happy with fewer features if the remaining features were really streamlined, but since they weren’t, the interface for A Machine for Pigs is definitely a step backwards.

AI
Every encounter with the monsters is so controlled and scripted that it’s hard to judge the AI. The monsters didn’t do anything too silly (like break down the door and immediately leave, like the brute in the morgue in The Dark Descent), but they didn’t do anything impressive either. The engineer pigs in the engine room stopped and stood still while I hung out on the ladder. The wretch guarding the machinery in the coolant area didn’t notice that I was on the ledge above him. The tesla pigs were moderately impressive, and the one in the orgone towers gave me the only real scare of the game. The AI definitely could have been used a lot better.

Bugs and Glitches
There are way too many glitches and bugs. I ended up playing a lot of zones twice because of them (thank goodness for autosave, at least.) The sconce [candlestick] in the church got stuck in a wrong wall. I got killed by a pigman and respawned on the wrong side of a locked door on the centrifuge map. I got stuck in a hole and couldn’t jump out. I also glitched through the map and fell through the world, though fortunately the game designers had taken that into account and I died and respawned without losing any progress.

Gameplay

Spoiler below!

Difficulty
A Machine for Pigs has a nice, easy difficulty level. Some may find it too easy. The puzzles are intuitive and simple, with plenty of hints to guide you to the correct solution. There are few relatively few chase sequences and monster encounters, but there’s also no real option besides running to deal with them.

Scare factor
A Machine for Pigs is not nearly as terrifying as its predecessor. In fact, it’s barely frightening at all. There is a lot of blood and death, a lot of psychological horror, a few jump scares, and some mild chase sequences. None of the chase sequences are as intense as the ones in The Dark Descent or even Penumbra: Overture. A big disappointment.

Atmosphere
The atmosphere wasn’t nearly as tense and scary as in The Dark Descent (although it ended up being creepier on a second playthrough). However, it was still good. I love all the details. The signs, posters, and symbols. The way the architecture changes between buildings. The pigs buried in the graveyard. The references tucked here and there. The trucks (I love those trucks)! The twitching frog in the centrifuge room! The location and time period feels authentic, especially in the notes, in a way that The Dark Descent did not convey.

Maps
I don’t really have much to say about the maps. They worked. They were very, very linear. I like that we got to go outside, and see more than just one building complex. I’m not sure the maps we got were the best ones for the game, though. We see a whole lot of the machinery, but very little of the butchery and processing components. It got a bit dull after a while. I don’t know what better levels would be, though. Probably more Aztec and jungle imagery, possibly some weirder, more alien architecture at the heart of the machine, and the horrors of 1899 and the upcoming century (so that we see the sick and starving in the streets and poorhouses, the insane being treated like animals in Bedlam, and glimpses of wars).

Story

Spoiler below!

Plot
There are some good moments and potential in A Machine for Pigs, but it’s wasted. Very little is ever explained. The story is told in the most boring way possible, though notes. Show, don’t tell! Every element of the plot that happens during the game proper—Mandus has amnesia, Mandus looks for his children, Mandus is betrayed by the mysterious figure who claims to be helping him, Mandus attempts to stop mysterious figure, Mandus sacrifices himself—is predictable. (It’s even worse when you consider that Mandus sabotaged the machine in the first place, fixes it, and then sabotages it again. Really?) There is a backstory, but the details and chronology of it is never properly laid out (to make matters worse, the date of at least one note is mislabeled). There are lots of references and symbolism, but without an understandable backstory, they’re pointless.

Characters
Oswald’s love for his sons and his urge to kill everyone is cliché and unexplained. His initial decision to sabotage the machine and the subsequent amnesia is left unexplored. The only interesting moment is when he kills his sons so they don’t experience the horrors of WWI. I know there’s supposed to be some sort of split personality thing going on, but since it was was only hinted at and never explored, it hardly counts as character development. The machine’s personality is mysterious, but that’s fine, since it’s a god or whatever. The pigmen go from being childlike to killing and raping with no explanation.

Writing
Some of the dialogue (spoken or in notes) really, really works (especially in the latter half of the game), while some of it feels like it is trying too hard and falls flat or comes off silly. The central metaphors are… well, ham-fisted is about the only way to describe their use. The lack of voice acting for the notes really hurts. The journal entries were too brief to be of much value to the story.

I think there’s some randomization of dialogue, so that you don’t get quite the same lines every time you play the game. I got lines the second time through I didn’t remember in the first and didn’t get lines I remember from the first time around. Maybe I’m just remembering it, though. I know the loading screen blurbs are random. This idea sounds good in theory, but in practice it adds nothing to the game. Yeah, it adds to replayability, but the story struggles enough with coherence before adding randomization in.

Interactivity
This is where A Machine for Pigs truly falls flat on its face. To tell a good story in a video game means making use of the player. Give them meaningful choices. Force them to participate. The Dark Descent did this. The player could occasionally choose the order in which the player did things. The player could choose the ending (even if the endings weren’t particularly good.) The player was forced to inject Daniel with the dead man’s blood and sacrifice the prisoner (seriously, clicking on the dagger and then the prisoner was far more horrifying than anything that happened in A Machine for Pigs). In A Machine for Pigs, there are barely any choices. The only thing the player is forced to do is push the button that activates the probes that stab into Mandus’ heart (which is one of the better moments of the game). Otherwise, the player is basically passive. It was a movie broken up by a short story. Heck, most of the interactive storybooks I played as a child had more interactivity than A Machine for Pigs did.