Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is free on Epic right now
This world is a machine, a machine for pigs, fit only for the slaughtering of pigs
Tis the season to be spooky, so you might fancy grabbing a free copy of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs from Epic to keep you quivering until Amnesia: Rebirth launches next week. Piggy-wigs was quite different for an Amnesia follow-up, having been made by Everybody's Gone To The Rapture developers Thechineseroom rather than series creators Frictional Games, but it does have some jolly unpleasant parts. Defs worth a poke for the price.
First released in 2013, the first-person horror game is set in London at the turn of the 20th century and revolves around a great and terrible machine. Off you go, exploring, puzzling, and fleeing from oinkers. It ditches a few bits from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, like the sanity and inventory systems, which disappointed some fans but it's decent as its own thing.
Jim Rossignol called it "a marvellous, revolting, disturbing sequel to Dark Descent" in his Amensia: A Machine For Pigs review:
"I could probably recommend A Machine For Pigs purely on the basis of its sound design. Few games pay as much attention to piling tension and startling you with sonics in the way that this does. It staggers violently between throbbing threat and violent, shuddering screams: sometimes of pigs, sometimes of tortured metal and failing machines, always of something that puts needles into that bit of your phrenology marked RUN AWAY. Going to open a door and having it BANGBANGBANGHOWL in your face is enough of a jump scare, but when the sound goes on and implies some vast machine starting up in the Earth beneath you, and architecture is buckling and coming down around you, and then pigs are screaming on the other side of the walls.
"Oh god."
Head on over to the Epic Games Store to get Amensia: A Machine For Pigs free for keepsies. You'll also find Kingdom: New Lands, a sequel to the minimalist side-scrolling RTS, up for free. Both have been given away on various stores before, but what use is the past to us now?
Frictional released the source code for Dark Descent and Piggy-wigs last month too, if you fancy really rooting around in it (or waiting to see what other people do with this - dare you dream of VR support?).
Next week's Epic freebies will also be spooky: Double Fine's cute trick-or-treating RPG Costume Quest 2, and first-person explore-o-horror Layers Of Fear 2.