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.
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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?”
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| 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.
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"I' have had it with these mother fucking pigs in this mother fucking machine!"
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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."
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| 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!"
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| 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...
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.
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| *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...
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| 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!
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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.
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| 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."
+ 
= ?
