Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Machines are hard to build. So many nuts and bolts and gears and rubber bands and ceaseless triathlete hamsters to arrange. But machines for pigs? They make regular ol’ mazes of mechanical madness look easy. I say this, of course, not from a place of personal experience, but from watching Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs slip ‘n’ slide from Halloween last year all the way into the indiscriminate reaches of 2013. But now, finally, it’s gracefully pirouetting into place, and Frictional’s seen fit to both paint a target and explain exactly what took so long in the first place.

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It’s been too long since we saw some moving pictures of the Amnesia sequel, A Machine For Pigs, this time developed by the Dear Esther team, thechineseroom. But we need wait no longer, as the fast approach of All Saints Day means spooky footage is of the highest order, and you can see the new trailer below. It’s a bit scary.

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It’s easy to forget Amnesia. And I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s a forgettable experience (it’s most certainly not) or that amnesia, the unfortunate mental condition, might lead to forgetfulness (duh). Rather, Dark Descent’s been out for two years, and it’s become pretty far removed from the public eye. Sure, it’ll occasionally pop up on the cover of some trashy tabloid rag (Did you know that it’s become both fat and Bigfoot?), but thechineseroom-developed A Machine For Pigs is now the series’ main attention hog. Over on Frictional’s blog, though, there’s an “Amnesia – Two Years Later” post that provides some super interesting info about the oppressively scary hit’s present and a brief taste of what Frictional’s up to now.

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It’s Halloween night, and you’re safe and sound in your own home. Even so, you feel a creeping sense of dread slowly start to take hold, but you can’t put your finger on what exactly is causing it. You glance over your shoulder. A werewolf. You glance over your other shoulder. A giant spider with masses of smaller spiders for eyes. You look in a mirror. Turns out, you’re dissolving into a writhing pile of centipedes. Then, the horror begins: “Sorry, guys,” you say. “Amnesia got delayed into 2013. We can’t play it tonight like we’d planned.” So your party’s really boring and anticlimactic – just like the end of this little story.

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The first footage for Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs all but confirms that the machine in question is not a belly-tickling porcine laughter factory, so there’s my hopes of a My Little Piglet friendship simulator dashed to bits against a dank wall. From Dear Esther developers The Chinese Room and Frictional, the game looks much more like The Dark Descent than I’d expected, wavering vision, cowering and hideous unseen hunters all being present and horribly incorrect. There are also outdoor areas though, which immediately gives me hope for greater variety in locations and maybe even a stronger adventure element. Could be very special.

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As it was rumoured, so it shall be. Dear Esther’s lead writer, Dan Pinchbeck, has revealed to Joystiq that thechineseroom are working on A Machine For Pigs, set in Amnesia’s world, although it won’t be a direct sequel to the dimly lit descent. It will, however, star a wealthy industrialist called Daniel Plainview Oswald Mandus, who returns from an ill-fated trip to Mexico in 1899 and finds that his body is plagued with fever and his mind is plagued with nightmares that revolve around an ominous machine. Possibly for pigs. Probably not some sort of mechanical pig disco and daycare centre.

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