Though I wish A Machine for Pigs had kept up the habit of reading journal entries in voiceover, which I liked in the first game, the phonographs scattered around the Factory along with the telephone conversations and flashbacks throughout the game give us enough of Oswald’ voice to get a proper feel for him. By the game’s end, every time I saw the lantern flicker I would experience a set of physical and mental reactions – the game had literally rewired my brain to its own ends, making me its experimental subject, its lab animal, setting up obvious resonances with the porcine monstrosities that haunt the Factory’s tenebrous corridors.Īs a protagonist, Oswald Mandus is a disturbing and fairly original character. The lantern not only creates a unique and original gameplay element, it has the added side-effect of reducing the player to the same level as an animal responding to a Pavlovian stimulus. Once I realized why the lantern was periodically flickering, I became conditioned to react to it in a certain way: whenever I caught it flickering I’d immediately turn it off, crouch down, and seek a hiding spot. The electric lantern replacing the oil lamp of The Dark Descent has an interesting feature: it flickers rapidly whenever a monster is near (other electric lights behave the same way). The gameplay in A Machine for Pigs is stripped down to the point of simplicity, but what it does give us is genius. The dust and cobwebs of Brennenburg have been replaced with oil and excrement, the crumbling stone with hissing pipes and buzzing electric dynamos. The industrial bowels of the Factory juxtapose cramped, claustrophobic tunnels with spaces of cavernous enormity crossed by rusty, zigzagging catwalks, alternating between submarine-like closeness and dizzying vastness. The levels are beautifully designed, a disturbing series of pens, abattoirs, seeping sewer tunnels, conveyer belts, generators, and churning gears.
The prose in the game – of which there is a great deal – is magnificently written: gruesome, rambling, poetic, and thematically profound, replete with motifs of animality, excretion, mechanization, sacrifice, spoiled innocence, and contamination. There will be a few mild spoilers below, so read at your own risk.Īs with its predecessor, A Machine for Pigs is brilliantly atmospheric, using a combination of sounds, shadows, music, and text to great effect. It’s certainly a worthy successor to The Dark Descent in most respects, and surpasses it in some. Having finished A Machine for Pigs I can now give it a more thorough review.
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