A Machine for Pigs

Getting Ashley to play these kinds of games involves a level of compromise.  For starters we have to turn on so many goddamn lights, that her apartment looks like the inside of a tanning bed.  She also takes advantage of an excuse I like to call the “Bladder Hourglass.”  Basically, this puts her nightmarish experience in Amnesia on a timer.  Once the bottom of the hourglass fills with pee, she has an excuse to quit and I have less material to work with.

2 cups of coffee + 1 bottle of ice tea + 3 glasses of water =
5 minutes of game play

A Machine for Pigs is the sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent and while both feature elements of memory loss and opening lots of fucking drawers, the similarities end there.  Where The Dark Descent was a Lovecraftian-themed journey through the draconian dungeons of a naked baron, A Machine for Pigs is more of a stroll through Upton Sinclair's The Jungle re-imagined by Jules Verne. Think steampunk Arby's.

As the title screen pops up, Ashley is perplexed by the name.  “A Machine for Pigs?  Do they mean as in ‘long pig’ or the thing that makes pulled pork sandwiches?”

Both

The game starts by immediately assaulting Ashley with its unsettling overture.  "Would it kill them to have some happy music in this game?"  Remembering what happened last time she tried to inject happy music into Amnesia, Ashley forwent the showtune mp3s on her phone and powered through the loading screen.  There is a quote that flashes about 'the pain of being human' by Dr. Samuel Johnson that she and 99% of players must have misread as Dr. Samuel Jackson.

"I' have had it with these mother fucking pigs in this mother fucking machine!"

And then from out of nowhere we hear what sounds like a sad, old man talking into a cardboard tube. "Daddy, Daddy, please don't kill me."  Ashley put on her best Grumpy Cat grimace.  "Oh great we're playing as a guy with a daddy complex.  'I NEED TO EAT MY CHILDREN!' I already do this in the Sims."

One Modest Proposal, hold the onion.  Order up!

A series of red lights spark to life revealing what we presume to be the 'Machine for Pigs'.  Something is obviously wrong with it as mist and electrical arcs start discharging everywhere and it starts screeching like a vacuum cleaner full of caltrops.  "DADDY!  DADDY!"  The player awakes trapped in some kind of cage-mounted bed but a mysterious figure opens the door.  Ashley isn't pleased by this sudden liberation and just as in Justine, she wasn't willing to get out of the cage.  "The door needs to stay closed and nothing bad will happen!"

Come play with us, Daddy!

The 'Crazed, old man' as Ashley describes him, is waddled out of his cage bed and into his foreboding, Victorian-era boudoir.  Ashley tries to pick up random objects around the room but realizes that unlike the previous Amnesia games, all the scenery is glued in place except for one thing.  "Hey!  I can pick up a chair!"  Now armed with her +1 Mahogany Chair of Child Slaying, Ashley confidently strode into the hallway.

"Daddy, daddy, find us..."
"Am I daddy?  Who's your daddy?  Daddy is going to hit you with a chair!  Daddy needs to pee..."  Ashley's 'Crazed, old man' made his way to a nearby room.  The narrator says something about "holding your hand and watching the blood pool between your legs" and Ashley is already put on edge by this place.  Clicking about she accidentally turned off a lamp and backpedaled to the cage door of another bed, closing it in the process.  "AHHHHH!  Did I do that?  Did I do that?"  She looks back and asks me.  Now during these play sessions, I try to be a professional, scientific observer taking copious notes and keeping interaction with the test subject to a minimum.  I like to pretend that it's for impartiality, but in truth it's just sadistic glee...

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/10368-Its-a-Nice-Day-for-A-Red-Wedding

Having played this portion of the game earlier, I knew when and where all the "scripted" scares were going to be.  Just around the corner from her was a short flight of stairs in a narrow hallway. Once the player starts to ascend, the lights flicker and a ball gently rolls down the stairs from around the corner, creating a sense of dread and unease in the player as they explore the mansion.  I figured that Ashley would see this ball and be so startled, that her brain would go into a primordial overdrive and misinterpret it as some kind of zombie head spider.

*SHLORP* *SKITTER SKITTER*

When she actually did go up that flight of stairs, she missed seeing the ball entirely because she was madly swinging the chair in front of her!  Ashley was more startled by accidentally closing the cage door than the ball that was intended to scare her.  But as I said in the first blog entry, Amnesia is a devious bastard and it has learned how to terrorize the bejesus out of Ashley.  It knew from The Dark Descent what caused her to madly grope for the Escape key: self-opening doors.  As Ashley slowly made her way down the hall, a whisper-soft gust of air opened a door to her right.    "WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"  Abandoning her trusty weapon, Ashley bolted in the opposite direction all the way back to the starting room of the game.  She was once again defeated by the same trick less than five minutes into the game.  The game I bought to write this blog.  At least this might explain why I'm the one that has to do all the grocery shopping...

Speak, friend, and enter

"Can I play Candy Crush now?"  Ashley whimpered and gave her saddest kitten eyes.  I knew that I could never convince her to play long enough to encounter any of Amnesia's monsters but I at least wanted her to experience the creepy atmosphere of the attic.  She begrudgingly complied and trudged back to the hallway with the offending door.  But it was at this moment that Ashley discovered her courage and fury.  No longer would she cower from the petty tricks of Amnesia's malevolent forces.  She was tired of running and now it would be Amnesia's turn to fear her!  Ashley picked up the chair she dropped earlier and with all her might cast it through the door that had dared to terrify her!   

Ashley strode victoriously into the small room to inspect its contents but her courage faltered when the game triggered a sudden atmospheric sound effect.  The loud clang caused her to shut the door behind her and now the humble servant's quarters became her refuge.  Standing on top of the bed she looked down and noticed a pile of clothes on the floor.  Now in her mind somehow she made a leap in logic that the discarded clothes meant that something was living beneath the bed.  To make matters worse there was a clicking sound just outside the door.  She was now trapped in a room with some unseen horror lurking just beneath her.

GIVE ME YOUR TENDER FINGER MEATS!!!!

"I'm done now!  For reals this time!" She slammed the Escape key.  Satisfied with the progress she was able to make (8 minutes, 31 seconds: a new record!), I asked Ashley what she thought was outside the door that terrified her so much.

"I'm guessing a little girl pieced together with pig parts.  'Where are you daddy?  Come eat my sweet meats, daddy!  I taste ever so good!'  And maybe one of those Clickers from The Last of Us."

       +           =    ?

Justine

Ashley got so bored this evening, that she agreed to play a horror game so I could make another post for this blog.  Whenever I even mention Amnesia, she gives me this grimace and dirty look as if my butt just farted out an insult about her mom.

So to be fair, I did not force her to replay Amnesia: the Dark Descent.  Instead I forced her to play Amnesia: Justine!

You're an asshole, Steve.

Justine is the 2011 expansion for Amnesia that has a whole new story line and setting but features the same basic underwear-soiling gameplay.

The game began with the same prompts about lowering light and putting on headphones to create the perfect ambiance.  Ashley wasn't having any of that.

Fuck the darkness!

After the prompt the camera zooms into what looks like a shadowy, round hole to which Ashley exclaimed: "I feel like I'm walking into a sphincter." This was followed by the title screen and another camera zoom into a dark hole.

"And now I'm walking into a vagina.  What's with this game and all the weird orifice holes?!"

After entering the weird "orifice hole", the player regains consciousness in a dungeon cell next to a phonograph.  Something shambles past the jail cell doors and Ashley is already off to a shaky start. "There's somebody out there!  It needs a sandwich.  Am I supposed to go out there?  I'm perfectly fine staying here. Getting fed and eating sandwiches."

No crust please

With Surgeon Simulator-like dexterity Ashley attempted to turn the crank on the phonograph.  After a few tries she was able to get the record to play.  An exuberant voice welcomes the player to this "cabinet of perturbation" with the enthusiasm of a Roman emperor.  So now Ashley is the be the subject of a cruel experiment for the entertainment of a sadistic observer.  She's also forced to play Amnesia.  Har har har.    

Ashley didn't really pay close attention to the message on the record.  She was far more concerned with what was outside of her cell.  "Is something going to jump out at me? I need to know these things before I go to the bathroom!"   Risking the cleanliness of her computer chair, Ashley pressed on expertly "strafing" through the dingy corridors until she reached a large cell block.

A small bottle on a nearby table was the first thing to grab her attention.  "Is that a protein shake?" Her cursor highlighted the bottle revealing it to be laudanum.  "Laudanum?  Is that like Ensure?"

Yes, Ashley, it's Ensure.  Now with 20% more opiates!

Amnesia always knows when it is being mocked by a player and it retorts with ambient sounds that can make a grown woman whimper like a four-year-old.    Determined to get further than she did in Dark Descent, Ashley started playing music from her phone hoping to somehow transform the whole scenario into a Joss Whedon musical.

How do you find a girl like Justine?
With Amnesia she won't remember a thing!  

Alas the swing music failed to cue a jaunty tune about psychological experimentation.  It did, however, keep Ashley from hearing the monster that burst through the opposite side of the room.  By the time she turned around it was too late.  Ashley's survival instincts hadn't failed yet and she did what all panicked players do in this game: throw a barrel.

If it can kill a fat, Italian plumber, it can kill anything.

In Amnesia when monsters get hit with a thrown object they do two things: first, they momentarily stumble back in utter disbelief that the player hasn't started running yet; second, they charge forward like a rabid Sumo wrestler with diaper rash.

Aaaaaughibbrgubugbugrguburgle!

"I QUIT! I QUIT!  I QUIT!" Ashley chanted as she ran face-first into the corner of the cell block.  Her shaking hands managed to locate the escape button to pause the game.  "I'm done!  I'm done!  You're an asshole!" <cries>

I asked Ashley if she managed to get a good look at the monster before she quit.  "It looked like, okay so you know in Angel that demon that drank from his little friend in bondage gear?   The peepee demon! You know he said 'it smells like pee pee!'" 

Close enough.

The beginning...and then the end

We had to compromise on the atmosphere as Ashley refused to play in the dark with headphones on.  By the light of her Ikea floor lamp my fiancée cranked up the gamma and brightness to Spongebob levels and proceeded to enter a very brightly-lit Castle Brennenburg.

No, not like that...

Yeah, that's more like it.

As Daniel regains consciousness, Ashley takes stock of her surroundings.

"Are these rose petals or blood?"  Rain filters through the crumbling masonry and there's a clap of thunder through the windows.  "This must be Portland."

Ashley tries to get a hang of the controls but Daniel's insanity vision quickly turned the game into a sobriety test simulator.  "Seriously, am I tripping on acid or something?"

No dear, that part comes later.

Suspicious of anything that could trigger a jump scare, Ashley approaches practically all objects with suspicion.  The suit of medieval armor in the starting hall was inspected warily just to have its helmet torn from its body by my blood-thirsty fiancée.

Who's the real monster here?  Not I...

"I'm hitting your butt with your own head!  How does your butt smell?" Ashley taunted gleefully at the helpless inanimate armor.  Amnesia can detect such hubris in its players so when she dared to confidently stride down the hall, a sudden breeze blew open an adjacent door.

"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!  I'm done."  

So this is why she's afraid to enter supermarkets...

Ashley was able to regroup from the game's first intended jump scare but startled herself when she accidentally hurled a chamber pot to the floor.  "Oh oh!  It came at my face!  Heheheheheh"

The hallway shook and rattled in anger at the sudden loss of pottery and Ashley lost her nerve to continue past the second hallway.  

"I don't want to play this anymore."  Three minutes into the game.  She didn't even get to the lantern.  That's the power of Amnesia: its atmosphere.  There isn't even a single monster until a half-hour into the game but all it needed were sound effects and wind to scare off most players.  

Ashley's dark descent into Castle Brennenburg is done but that's probably for the best.  If she's too scared to sleep at night, then I'm not allowed to sleep either. :(

Anyawdy eee eye entures?

After exiting the game, Ashley opened Tropico where she could take on the role of cruel tormentor.  Maybe we could return to Amnesia another time but 10 minute intervals is enough for her.  In the mean time Generalissimo Ashley is going to deny her people basic healthcare and religious freedoms.  Viva la Revolucion!  

And now to turn all the corn crops into tobacco...

Prologue

There are a lot of things that scare my fiancée Ashley: spiders, ghosts, bees, cracking my knuckles, fibers on the carpet that look like spiders, I could go on.  So a game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (the digital cure for pleasant dreams and constipation) should downright scare the ever-living crap out of her. 

Let me give a little background on this game.  In 2010 Frictional Games released another survival horror, first-person, puzzle, nightmare-inducer baring a slight resemblance to their Penumbra series.  The player takes on the role of Daniel, a British archeologist armed only with a lantern and superb voice acting.  You wake up in a puddle of Pepto-Bismol with no memory of why you are in a Prussian castle but know that some kind of reality-dissolving shadow monster is stalking you.

Ashley grew tired of setting fire to Sims this weekend and wanted to try something new.  I jokingly suggested Amnesia and surprisingly, she agreed.  My poor fiancée has no idea what she has gotten herself into.