Games With Grey

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a self-styled horror title which is rarely horrifying; rather than being defined by tension and dread, the experience is defined by a damning boringness – dull forgettability abounds; player engagement is fleeting. Much boredom springs from the environments explored, mundane and boring all, the environments collectively characterized by their unimaginativeness and general dearth of creativity. This failing is glaring when considering how excellent the early explorable environments are, where imaginativeness actually thrives rather than being stifled. Consider only the place of the narrative’s opening, specifically a sprawling manor of sorts situated in the London vastness. A wonderful Gothic aesthetic is achieved here, and the structure is greatly evocative of place, serving a transportive function, the building featuring intricate wallpapering, opulent furnishings and the like, directly suggestive of owner prosperity. The corridors and rooms are admittedly defined by a certain sameness, which directly and needlessly complicates navigation, but diversity’s stifling here was deliberate, employed for dramatic effect; the disorienting sensations were willed, the manor large and cavernous, complexly built even while situated in an implied urban space. The player character Mandus, meanwhile, is the inverse of large, his insecurities and vulnerabilities readily observable even while internally capable and talented; he is dwarfed by his environment, and exploring this space – his manor – is enjoyable and rewarding indeed; early successes are achieved. Immediately succeeding this environment, meanwhile, comes a chapel of sorts, adjacent to the manor proper. If that former place was opulent and intricate, then this place is excessively so, beautifully so; the vaulted ceilings reach upward towards the heavens, beautiful windows letting in a reassuring light which cuts through the darkness, while manmade lighting has its place, too. Eeriness abounds here, existing alongside true beauty – the sanctuary is disarming and strangely charming indeed, candles and candelabra carefully strewn about the place, a secondary source of lighting, objects inherently comforting and reassuring. It is difficult to overpraise these two opening environments, just as it is difficult to communicate how boring their successors are.

Rather than exploring Gothic corridors suggestive of human smallness and fragility, the player is forced to navigate sewers and cisterns, ugly environments and environments generally devoid of atmosphericness – the haunting sensations are lost, the developers failing to realize that eeriness does not simply arise by emphasizing an environment’s literal darkness; lessened visibility does not instantly equate to total dread. And yet, the developers do over rely on darkness, to a cheap and frustrating extent. This emphasization only prompts greater repetitiveness in exploration, and when this failing, this pervasive repletion, is paired with the environments generally unimaginative and mundane principles, disastrous are the results – exploration, so central to the experience, suffers, as those same dank sewer corridors are crossed and recrossed, as the player blindlessly gropes about in feeble lantern light; the environmental glories of the early game are forgotten; darkness and drabness overtake all. Missed potential exists, too, in that on two occasions Mandus is given total freedom, actually capable of exploring the London streets (to a very constrained and deliberately focused extent). Before making this initial ascent Mandus was – expectantly – exploring some cistern or other such mundane location, trudging through boredom and creative poverty. Logic suggests the openness of the city streets would be the perfect panacea to this swelling boredom. The streets could be used to inject environmental diversity, too, directly clashing with what came before. None of these great potentialities are seized upon, and the London vastness overembraces the darkness overembraced elsewhere. What could be a beacon of light which communicates humankind’s better nature, or at least more civilized nature, instead becomes simple environment, communicating no larger messages. Potential greatness is squandered, and the city streets suffer from their sharp mundaneness. Erratic, flickering street lighting superficially suggests moodiness, but before the player can grow immersed and engrossed in this rather detached environment, they are again plunged into the sewer depths, the simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic cisterns.

Failures in world building and level design are countered by an excellent and frequently poignant narrative, the plotting and thematic direction easily being the game’s greatest achievement. When considering genre – this is a horror title – the narrative tone is expectantly bleak, almost excessively so – lightness and optimism are neigh totally absent here, and the developers strove to communicate humankind’s natural barbarities and predilections for destruction and violence. Indeed, they delight in this violence, and the narrative proper benefits from this delight, which prompts uniqueness. Opening on New Year’s Eve in 1899, at the center of the affair is the mentioned Mandus, whose earnest and decidedly voice acting establishes him as a mostly likable and endearing individual and player character – a connection is fast established. And while humanity and human flaws are zealously embraced throughout, the developers subtly, unintrusively inserted some otherworldly attributes, namely in the form of a vision – in a trip away from London, from his thriving and expanding industrial practices, Mandus was provided a damning glimpse of the future. The results of that gazing were frustrating and demoralizing indeed, as images of violence and destruction flitted through his eye, the narrative expressly dwelling upon mustard gas’s presence in his vision, that damning chemical agent emblematic of the Great War and the brutal struggles in Europe, an impossibly dark time in history. But added humanity exists here, too, namely when considering Mandus’s children – a pair of sons, Edwin and Enoch. When considering their ages, they would likely be subject to conscription, forced to enlist in the English military, whereupon they would likely be shipped off to the Continent to engage in warfare, to navigate trenches, to potentially suffer the damning aftereffects of debilitating mustard gas, a fate Mandus was alerted too. Sufferings awaited them, and it could not be otherwise, for the world is a dark place, one growing increasingly darker. Awareness of this darkness prompts action – in a fit of desperation and fear, Mandus kills both of his sons, a mercy killing, one conducted to spare them of the pains inherent to an existence in the modern world – the profound narrative boldly hinges on death.  

It is easy to imagine the fragmentation this occurrence, this murder, wreaked on Mandus, and this fragmentation only humanizes Mandus further. The narrative is rather interpretable, meanwhile, and one interpretation suggests that Mandus’s larger journey, the narrative progression, is one inspired by regret. Being an empowered and inventive individual, a startlingly affluent individual, Mandus has attained basic mastery over life and death, learning in his experimentations and technological innovations; he is a product of the modern world, of genius’s cherishing. With this mastery and genius comes longing – ought Mandus resurrect his two dearly beloved boys? Is life in a cruel and hostile world better than an existence in the dirt, in some coffin, where one is inevitably subject to a rotting away, festered on by the worms? And so Mandus contemplates, and so he engages his two sons in discourse all throughout the journey – they serve as guides, and he acts for them. And beyond the boys then societal bleakness is manifested in another fashion, too. Mandus directly contributes to this bleakness in his experimentations and industrial advancements, both of which have won him prosperity and acclaim – and also inspired internal guilt. In many ways, Mandus is like some Oppenheimer, his inventions improving the world just as they contribute to its potential destruction. His efforts increase mechanization dramatically, but his efforts are steeped in darkness, in that they can be seized upon by men of power and employed to brutal, despairing ends. The thought exists that if Mandus abandoned his projects and destroyed his works, society would be spared a viable and potent threat. And so Mandus is divided, and beyond concern for his murdered boys, he also shows profound self-awareness and guilt. The narrative ends in a rather bizarre and not exactly satisfying fashion, though the consistently dark – the unflinchingly bleak – narrative must be championed, challenging the player, distressing the player just as the environments which host this narrative scarcely challenge or distress the player; a commanding imbalance exists here.     

A Machine for Pig’s core gameplay is an additional failure, greatly defined by simplicity and regression, especially when considered alongside its immediate predecessor, The Dark Descent. That game belonged to the survival horror genre, placing considerable emphasis upon inventory management and resource conservation – the player was constantly interrogating these two gameplay systems, managing lantern fuel – finite – in addition to other substances like flame-producing tinder boxes and laudanum, a health restorative. All of these concerns are absent here – the lantern’s fuel is inexhaustible, while tinder boxes and laudanum have been removed outright. This signals a shift in tone and gameplay direction, absolutely, a bold and original shift. And this shift is not by nature a negative – experimentations and departures both directly lead to progress. But here the shift is very much tinged by negativity principally owing to the oversimplification of mechanics. When the survival horror elements are stripped away – and they are absolutely stripped away here – then the game devolves into mere walking simulator, becomes an overall shallower and more unengaging experience, as the player merely plods throughout the mundane environments, rarely acting upon them. A Machine for Pigs, then, is shallow and unengaging, simultaneously showing a complete adherence to focused linearity, which is actually somewhat of an asset. This linearity ensures the pacing is mostly consistent, excellent and rapid, to be sure, this pacing only occasionally frustrated and stalled by sometimes cryptic and unclear level design – see some early sequences in Mandus’s sprawling Gothic manor. Crypticness’ frequent spurning means the game rarely drags excessively, and the mostly energetic pacing is a source of excellence. For all the gameplay shallowness, then, the rejection of survival horror, the experience is preserved by relative unpredictability; the player can never know when the core antagonist – a bizarre swine-like entity, seeming fusion of man and pig, hulking, monstrous and frightening – will spawn, and this uncertainty only makes the beast’s emergence more impactful. The beast’s presence is mostly minimized, meanwhile, and this frequent minimization heightens the distressing impactfulness of its appearances.   

The greatest gameplay failure of all, however, arises from the reduced importance of puzzle-solving. In The Dark Descent, the player could engage in particularly elaborate puzzle-solving sequences – gather the requisite components needed for acid’s composition, for instance, and then combine those components in the appropriate fashion, manipulating various mechanisms, influencing the quantity of the constituent components. This one task involves cerebral stimulation and careful scouring of the environments, the entire affair easily ballooning into a twenty or thirty minute long engagement – it is wonderfully elaborate, and this is but one example of many. The puzzle-solving prompted depth – and a fair degree of heart and uniqueness, compensating for the sometimes tensionless nature of the overall experience. Here, though, puzzle-solving essentially devolves down to, “locate this pipe and then rotate that pipe clockwise to unlock some such door or other structure.” Or, the more “elaborate” puzzles might revolve around coal manipulation, the player forced to move that substance into nearby furnaces to enable further progression. The simplification relative to The Dark Descent is especially notable and especially damning here, and this decreased emphasis on puzzle-solving damages cerebral engagement – the affair becomes automated rather than inspiring, necessitating, constant thought, ponderance, and engagement with the environments. Automation is indeed the ideal word here, and the game sometimes seems to play itself, scarcely demanding total attention.    

A Machine for Pigs is a terribly mundane experience, one which skirts total disaster solely owing to its frequently profound narrative, which grapples with darkness and actively thrives in that grappling – a larger message is advanced here, the developers suggesting humans are not so far removed from beasts, or have at least not stripped free of the beasts’ murderous impulses. The narrative, then, carries the title, and locating the various discoverable documents scattered about the game world – and then promptly reading those documents – is rewarding and satisfying indeed, the writing being earnest and of generally excellent quality, wonderfully supplementing the larger narrative proper, all in a cleverly unintrusive fashion. Mandus, then, becomes singularly likable, even as his hands are stained red in the blood of his two sons, slaughtered seemingly to spare them up societal darkness and harshness, even as his hands are stained red in the blood his various productions can potentially spill. Whenever narrative is deemphasized in A Machine for Pigs, the experience suffers – in those quiet, plodding moments of cistern navigation, sewer navigation, the experience collapses, in that the level of tension these sequences evoke is insufficient as to court and maintain player interest – dread is fleeting; boredom abounds. Boredom is exacerbated further by the uninvolved nature of the gameplay, which rarely demands thought; the player is emotionally engaged, to be sure – consider only Mandus’s tale, Edwin’s and Enoch’s tale – though not intellectually. Resources are infinite, health restores itself fully and automatically, and all the higher concerns present in The Dark Decent are completely absent here. The experience ultimately suffers from these omissions, being a very inferior experience, even with the considerable narrative heft and the fleeting, very fleeting displays of environmental beauty and majesty (though even the greatest overtures of beauty and grandeur achieved here cannot possibly compete with The Dark Descent’s Castle Brennenburg).

As a brief aside and conclusion, having completed this title, I have played every entry in the entire Amnesia series, a rather telling experience. The games are of woefully uneven quality, the only undisputed masterpiece being the most recently released The Bunker. Whatever survival horror flourishes existed in The Dark Descent, they were seized upon with redoubled emphasis by this newer title. Now, the player was forced to grapple not only with fuel supplies – a light-providing generator was on hand, though its usage was directly connected to that substance, consumed at a fairly rapid rate necessitating sharp resource management – but also with more offensive concerns like revolver rounds and the like. The tension thriving in The Dark Descent, meanwhile, saw further expansion here, largely owing to the central antagonist’s frightfulness, beastliness, both communicated through effective and haunting sound design, while that beast’s presence was a neigh constancy, the beast constantly asserting its presence with its wails and pursuits. And just as here, those environments, those claustrophobic World War I bunkers, were evocative indeed, the player literally transported backwards into a different world, a believable world though one of deliberately exaggerated menace – the creature stalking those bunkers has no real analogues in reality, its portrayal and creation a production of human imagination, a wonderful production of the human imagination Believable or no, wonderfully creative and bold or no, The Bunker marks a series’ triumph, being a masterful and personally resonant experience.

The plodding The Dark Descent must be lauded, too, not exclusively for its consistently Gothic aesthetics, its passionate and whole-hearted embracing of those aesthetics, but also because of its experimentations with madness and humankind’s mental instabilities and fragilities – Daniel was an excellent protagonist indeed, his descent into madness a despairing and troubling descent, what communicated by sound design’s manipulation and the clever implementation of visual distortions and the like, oversized insects sometimes crawling about the screen. And just as emotions were stimulated, the mind was, too, the player forced to assess their environments and make sense of the vagueness and the vague complexities sometimes presented them – the developers respected the player rather than assuming the playerbase to have lessened capabilities for success in puzzle-solving and environmental manipulation. The experience, then, was a wonderfully mature one, even as violence was comparatively muted, only a few instances of exaggerated gore emerging – see the exploited Agrippa’s gruesome and emaciated frame. A wonderfully innovative construction, with its toying with madness and subsequent depiction of that madness, and crucially with its perpetual stressing of player helplessness, this title abounds in memorability even while deprived of the gameplay complexities introduced and thriving in The Bunker. It is a profound experience indeed.   

Rebirth, meanwhile, was a complete disaster, repeatedly stressing bizarre supernatural elements which were misguided. The Dark Descent periodically explored strangeness, its principle antagonists resembling shuffling, reanimated corpses, though still that game exercised restraint, balancing the bizarre with the grounded. None of this applies to Rebirth, which fast becomes a nonsensical mess, even as the desert landscapes are admittedly beautiful in their exoticness. In a fundamental failing, meanwhile, these beautiful, haunting sandscapes are displaced by otherworldly structures, the entire experience defined by such displacement, the human elements seeing relative diminishment, especially when considered alongside The Dark Descent, the protagonist Daniel’s journey, interrogation of the self. Rebirth’s narrative and writing are excessively pretentious, too – I have no fond memories for this title, a title preoccupied with otherworldliness, ambitiously leaping from dimension to dimension, ultimately failing in that ambition. And then there is this title, which exists one rung above Rebirth. This title’s saving grace is, expectantly and totally, its narrative. Mandus’s tale – a tale of all humankind in the corrupt and violent modern era – is resonant and effective indeed, greatest overtures of resonance connected to the sharp sense of relatability; it is easy and instinctual to identify with Mandus, even as he shows periodic departures from humanity. His creations and technological advancements – often used for viler purposes by corrupt and external forces – would seemingly mark him as a villain, one deserving of disdain and dismissal. In practice, as the narrative progresses the player gradually connects and sympathizes with Mandus more and more, and the player / player character connection which emerges and eventually thrives here is a singularly masterful achievement. The cisterns and sewers will be forgotten and immediately, while the shallow gameplay systems, characterized by regressions, are just as easily forgotten. But Mandus, his portrayal, staves off total disaster and calamity – the title is flawed but narratively ambitious, and such ambitiousness’s existence must be acknowledged and championed; it is a major source of greatest amidst a turbulent sea of failures.