Just FYI to everyone - this effort is being done by Accursed Farms' Ross Scott. He is the creator and voice artist for the Freeman's mind series, runs a show called Ross's Game dungeon (if you like Mandy's channel i can almost garuntee you'll like it) and is fighting to give us consumers and game-enjoyers the right to play our games after the publisher arbitrarily decides to cut support for it. I HIGHLY recommend you all go check out his latest video, and the entire channel, Accursed Farms. I don't think you'll be disappointed!
In what can only be considered a thematic masterstroke, the action that ultimately causes our main character to try and undo his wrongs is to squeeze his hog.
I don't want to derail the Amnesia misery, but thanks for the mention! The more more people are able to file complaints, the better the odds we can get agencies' attention on killing games.
"Man, this game is so dark." "Yeah, it has some pretty crazy themes huh?" "No, I mean I literally cant see whats happening, this game is extremely dark"
Probably the only thing I liked about this game. I'm done with walking simulators. It's hard to have fun when a game has basically no mechanics to speak of. Or puzzles.
I loved the idea, but was disappointed by how little we actually got to see of the titular machine. Early concept arts had these blood soaked processing lines with torsos on meat hooks and whatnot, but in the game you mostly just see drab corridors and pipes. (When you see anything at all that is, since it's so dark all the time.) You rarely feel in danger, even though you are allegedly crawling through the guts of a machine made for turning you into sausage. And where's all the meat?
@@Ohio.Gozaimasu I've one person say of A Machine for Pigs, it's a game with a story so good it would've been much better off as a book instead of a videogame...
You weren't joking about how dark the game was. I'm sitting here trying to watch this on my phone at work and I'm just staring at my reflection most of the video
Halligan is a walking horror story. He would have found ways to make what the antagonists did in each game look like a joke with little to no effort on his part.
@@tomtheconqerurHalligan's solution to stopping Alexander would have been to somehow impersonate him and ruin his reputation with his lover / wife so badly she'd leave him so he doesn't have any reason to return home anymore
@@baransevim3969Briggs is like King from One Punch Man, he's getting the credit that should be going to Saitama. If you play through the Limbo of the Lost, you realize that the person who calls the shots and clears most of the puzzles is actually you, there are times where he's insane logic actually works (trapping the Soul Taker), but most of the thinking and doing is actually done by you, including the part that involves saving him in the last level. He just gets the credit because he's the talking head.
Yeah, that's pretty wild. The life we are all living RIGHT now and the world we live in is so horrifying to a person of the past that they decide it would be better to just blow up the planet than let that happen. I honestly feel a lot of trepidation for the future. It seems the world is gearing up for WW3, Germany says that Russia will attack NATO in the next 5 years and their army will be twice its current size in 2 years European countries bordering Russia are bringing back conscription. The US keeps trying to make it so they can draft women. China seems determined to eventually attack Taiwan, which the US says they will use nukes to defend. Global warming has already gone past the point of no return it is no longer possible to avoid the worst events. In 20 years the equator will shift southward making it impossible to farm in the current equator which is were 90% of the worlds food is grown. Anywhere higher than Germany on the equator will become unlivable arctic wastelands. My sister shared a theory to me about why Russia is attacking the Ukraine is actually because global warming will make Russia nigh unlivable and Ukraine is further south and is also where a pretty hefty chunk of the worlds grain is grown. Russia is fleeing the coming climate apocalypse by invading their southern neighbors. TLDR we are all so fucked
I'm at a weird place where that final monologue from the Engineer is more impactful than anything in The Dark Descent, but almost everything else is so subpar that I'll choose The Dark Descent every time without even having to think about it.
As a game it's basically a walking sim, and the story doesn't really make sense when you look at it too closely, but to be fair, thematically it stuck with me in a way other Amnesia games didn't. The ending is haunting, poetic, and resonates deeply. The writing of the closing monologues is some of the tightest I've seen, and still gives me goosebumps when I find myself thinking back on them. It lingered with me for a long time. It's a shame those moments are little more than bright sparks in an otherwise quite needlessly dull and drab and perplexing experience.
someone took a lot of drugs and wrote down "people are just pigs dude" then came back later and made a game out of it none of it is thought through and the basic premise is never expanded upon so I can only imagine that's what happened Or they are just incompetent writers
@@Arkangel630 Congratulations, you missed the whole story and theme. Within it is the manic obsessions with realizing systems exploit people for nothing but the benefit of the machine itself. Capitalism, industrialism, class structure, extractionism, imperialism, colonialism, organized religion, and so on. Systems that benefit a very few, but ultimately horrors that are carried out not because it'll centralize power more to those specific people, but because they are necessary for the system itself to survive. The driving force behind these atrocities isn't limitless greed, it's survival. It's not driven by any human at the top, it is purely mechanical by the system itself. Then upon realizing that, humans will build new systems to usurp the old ones they see as corrupt, but merely end up recreating similar systems because certain means have to justify its ends, and because exploitation and its mechanisms is all these humans have known, it's what they know how to recreate. It's a criticism of cultural revolutionary ideas that instead of abandoning systems altogethether, merely turns the system on its head to target the new perceived threat. Even a system like that aimed at "the rich" or "the church", ultimately sees the same previously poor and downtrodden sacrificed in the process, because it's ultimately anger aimed at the past and its cruelties, not then hope for a better future. That last part is just the justification. It's very good framing to have this from the perspective of an industrial capitalist who is the kind of person who has the means to create new systems, and thus is the one to enforce his reality onto society as a whole, regardless of how flawed and emotionally driven it truly is. He is already "the elite" that he claims to be against, but also sees himself as better equipped to fix the world than anyone else who doesn't have his(inherited) means, and just like the people he claims to be against, will use the poor as fuel for his own personal revolution, and thus participates in the same dehumanization that he critiques other institutions for. The story and theming is excellent, and what we should be mentioning when talking about why writing in video games is important, but like mandalore pointed out, it's still quite flawed in executing these themes properly, sometimes being too blunt or forceful with its metaphors, so my interpretation of its writing is more what I would like to imagine the game is trying to examine, not so much what it actually does or how well it does it. There's good writing attached, but it's quite telling that this good writing is only really apparent from actual plain text, so it's not really translated into the video game medium.
As a game it's basically a walking sim, and the story doesn't really make sense when you look at it too closely, but to be fair, thematically it stuck with me in a way other Amnesia games didn't. The ending is haunting, poetic, and resonates deeply. The writing of the closing monologues is some of the tightest I've seen, and still gives me goosebumps when I find myself thinking back on them. It lingered with me for a long time. It's a shame those moments are little more than bright sparks in an otherwise quite needlessly dull and drab and perplexing experience.
@@Blisterdude123It feels like this game is less interested in making you feel fear than it is in making you feel dread. Short term scares and danger are an afterthought because they don’t want you to worry about what’s hiding in the dark, they want you to worry about what’s coming in the future. By that same token, I admire it as an experimental game and a piece of storytelling but I don’t necessarily like it.
>By definition, friction is rough, it resists you. You know what friction also makes? Heat! It might also make sparks. And if you don't have heat, you're not gonna cook. That means the pork Machine For Pigs brought to my dinner party is cold cut Oscar Meyer. And that pork is made with chicken. This is Chicken Gameplay. Truly an all-timer
big credit for shouting out stopkillinggames Ross Scott is doing lord's work and seeing him being able to organize something with real possibility to succeed when he's been talking about the issue for so long without there being anything to grasp on to is fantastic.
Quick note about statement regarding indigenous pigs in the Americas, from around 25 minutes. Old world pigs were introduced with Cortez, but javelinas/peccaries are a new world variety of pigs that are native to the Americas.
First thing I thought when the name was mentioned. I was like hang on are we not gonna acknowledge how outrageously eye-roll inducing that is? Vidya game writing y'all.
Non native english speaker here, is Oswald Mandus a pun ? Or is it just a ridiculously old-timey name ? [edit] thank you all ! So yeah that name has the subtlety of a cinderblock.
"Almost like a graphical bug." Yes, the "blue fog bug" which relates to the "color grading" option, basically adds a layer of colored fog with each new level that loads in. It has been there since the beginning and can only be removed with a new mod that you can find on nexusmods. With it, the game looks like a remastered version.
I was kinda surprised he didn't mention any kind of modding to see if it helped with the visuals. Yeah, I know its kind of a cop-out, because it's obviously working as the devs intended, but I might've been nice for him to try out that Mod on Nexus to see if it helped. I kinda wish I'd know about it now.
Mandalore covered at least four other games where mods fix em. There's likely hundreds of games that get fixed up by a dedicated player base. @@peppermillers8361
"'I will chase at him!' said the Pigsmen as he chased John Amnesia. John Amnesia laterned the greasy Pigsmen. But the ceiling fell and they were trapped and unable to chase or lantern. "No I must lantern the pigmens!" John Amnesia shouted The telephone said "No John. You are the pigsmens." And then John Amnesia was A Machine for Pigs."
First they called the rich pigs, and I agreed because I am not rich man. Then they called politicians pigs, and I agreed because I am not a politician. Then they called the capitalists pigs, and I agreed because I am not a capitalist. Then they called me a pig. Oink oink
31:28 ...Post nut clarity as start of an attempted redemption arc. I was just going to make a "That'll Do, Mandy. That'll do." joke, but THAT'S a new character origin even for my horror rotted brain.
According to wikipedia "Frictional Games wanted to further the Amnesia franchise, but had no time for it. Later, they met Dan Pinchbeck of The Chinese Room at GDC Europe 2011, where the plan for the game began to form. It was originally intended by The Chinese Room to be a small mod, but it was expanded to a larger scale project when "the two companies realized what could be achieved with a larger game" " This game is essentially a mod elevated by the developers to sequel status.
Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, GMod, Rocket League, Killing Floor, Rising Storm, DayZ, etc all started as/trace lineage to mods as well. It CAN work out in the hands of skilled people with a unified vision.
I find the presentation of the Machine's motivation really interesting. Normally, the ancient beings form beyond are shown treating mortal lives as insignificant. But, here, we have an ancient being, who encounters death very rarely, react the scale of death at the Somme as mind-shattering horror. The machine isn't some unknowable thing with ancient purpose - it's simply gone mad.
I think it's more of Oswald's own horror, machine (or eldritch influence) just coaxed him into making it real. Judging by the fact that machine itself eats people and it turned Oswald's reason inside out (to save people you must kill at least 90% of them... What?) It probably has no qualms about human suffering.
Which I think is a bit odd, because absolutely, things like wwi or even ii weren’t nearly as proportionally devastating as previous centuries. They are just visually more bombastic because of the scale of the entire system was larger with planes and machinegubs and stuff. A war between two tribes will often kill and cause more people to suffer proportionally then ww1 would. the difference between 200/1000 and 1million/10million. Then not also focus on universal education or the rise of penicillin. If you focus on numbers instead of relativity, you can make anything seem any way. But I guess its a dramatic setup anyways. I just wish more peices of media tried to engage with the concept of relativity when talking about more abstract concepts like progress.
@@InternetHydra Honestly, I've had something similar brewing for the setting I've been working on. In this setting, massive terraforming machines called Titans were conditioned to enjoy cultivating worlds into being suitable for Earthly life, with a desire to see intelligent life flourish in their gardens, enabling their creators to expand across a greening galaxy. However, the Titans were hijacked by a nefarious force that stood in opposition to the values of the Titans' creators, forcing the Titans to watch on in horror as their bodies committed atrocities against their creators. Many shut down their sensory systems, choosing instead to wallow in the memories of better times, while others went mad before they could take that blissful plunge into eternal dreaming. The force that hijacked the Titans was eventually destroyed, cast down by a coalition of peoples who would later be known as the Elder Races, but the damage was done. Practically all Titans born before the hijacking were traumatized to varying degrees; some just wanted to return to what they enjoyed, while others flew directly into the nearest stars, resolved to escape the horrid memories that they could never be rid of. And then there were those who could no longer trust anything that could potentially violate them, as the hijackers once did. In many cases, this mistrust manifested as a grim wariness of any civilization that lived in their gardens, but there were many Titans who had also lost their empathy for sentients altogether, willing to commit genocide if they suspected civilizations of developing technology that would let them assert control over the Titans. In a tragic twist of irony, the hostility of certain Titans provided a grim impetus for societies to pursue such avenues of research, for even the mightiest of interstellar empires could not combat the Titans conventionally. But despite everything that had happened, there were Titans who could not abide the thought of permitting genocide, even with the dread of another hijacking present in their darkest thoughts, and thus began the War in Heaven. Those Titans who still cherished sapients were driven to combat their mad siblings and cousins, turning the galaxy into a dark forest gripped by war. Space was no longer safe to traverse as this war raged across the millennia, and the Elder Races were forced to fall back on the narrow Backroads of old, making risky journeys between dimensions in order to travel from world to world. Despite clinging on as best they could, the empires of the Elder Races fell into decline as reality became more and more hostile, as beings that once cultivated bountiful gardens now battled over the fate of intelligent life itself, all while haunted by the memory of being prisoners in their own possessed bodies.
@@InternetHydra I could swear there's an story out there that is about that: an immortal being from outside reality who, by its own nature, does not know death and even lacks the concept of "stopping to exist". Hence, when it sees how humans do not question their fate to die, and are perfectly willing to kill other living beings or other members of their own kind, it is horrified. Again, I could swear there's a story like that, but I can't remember the name or anything beyond what I said.
That food analogy comment made me realise Mandalore has never actually made a food analogy in his videos until now. Edit : I looked back, he did make a food comparison with adventure games and dairy products in his Blade Runner the game review.
@@TheAsylumCatthey are usually the first and most simple ones and I’m pretty sure it’s what teachers use to teach children about analogies. A bit like comparing everything to sex I suppose. IF I WERE TO USE A FOOD ANALOGY: It’s a bit like processed food. Simple, cheap and no nutrition.
Fun fact: Mandus is voiced by Toby Longworth, one of the best audiobook readers for Warhammer’s Black Library. And having listened to plenty of the books he’s narrated, I’m not surprised that the voice acting is one of the strong suits of this game. The man has some serious talent.
@@michaelmiller7928 While we’re at it, I must shout out my personal favorite narrator, and one that is severely underrated, David Timson. His ability to portray quiet desperation, fear, confusion, despair, and horror in his voice is second to none. The quiet whispers send chills down my spine every time. Fulgrim, Legion, Angel Exterminatus, they’re all fantastic. (And he’s my personal head canon voice for Fulgrim.)
The entire game is so very 5/10, but that final monologue, with and without story context, is an easy 11/10 with that music "I have stood knee deep in mud and bone, and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved. This is your coming century! They will EAT them Mandus! They will make pigs of you all, and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will EAT. YOUR. HEARTS."
The music entirely carries the scene. Because once you remove the music, your brain will 100% start to actually listen to the dialogue as a whole and contextually associate "who is saying this and why"? and you realize "oh its pointless and just a schizo creator self insert post WW1 commie fail rant re-phrasing".
@@PANCAKEMINEZZyou couldn’t be more wrong. Jessica Curry’s legendary composition is one of the best accompaniments to the already fantastic final monologue. You have no clue what you’re talking about. AMFP’s flaws are almost all development and design based; The Chinese Room’s poor influence ends at that. You just have unimaginably shit taste I’m sorry dude
I once saw a UA-camr play Machine for Pigs so calmly that he killed any fear I had in the game. He was dealing with the same task at 14:46, and the UA-camr just very patiently completed it, thus revealing that he was never in any actual danger. Contrast with my first full playthrough of The Dark Descent, where I decided to just dash into the Wine Cellar because I figured the monster I saw wandering past the door must be another illusion this early in the game EXCEPT IT WASN'T.
25:02 i could be reaching but that also reminds me of the story of how Tenochtitlan was founded- by spotting an eagle holding a snake sitting on top of a cactus in the middle of a lake
Specifically it ties to Huitzilopochtli the Aztec god of war and the sun who was the principle god the Aztec dedicated their sacrifices to. In legend the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan was founded when Huitzilopochtli cut the heart out of his nephew Copil and threw it into lake Texcoco to protect the Aztecs. He then told the Aztecs to build a new city where he threw the heart which would be marked by an Eagle perched on a cactus and eating a feathered serpent or "Precious serpent" as it's also called. Which is on the flag of Mexico. Huitzilopochtli cut the heart out of an enemy to protect his people, and in turn they made a new society where they mirror his actions to stave off the darkness. Mandus likewise was ready to sacrifice others to stave off the doom of the future.
During your segment criticizing the lighting, I can imagine someone from the studio feeling totally vindicated because they were saying the exact same thing but they went with the "Not being able to see anything is scary" approach anyway.
@@ComissarYarrick both were made on the same engine. also, why does codename panzers need a remaster when the game is "get the biggest panzers you can find and right-click on the objective"
A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain’t never going back… not never.
@@okmujnyhbDepends on where you are, places like Edinburgh and Glasgow are pretty equitable to any other modern European city, if on the smaller side. There are some shitty small towns but it's still just shit by the standards of a developed country. When you get further up north, especially the Highlands, it gets more sparse population wise but it's a lovely landscape. Very green, watery country. The weather's a bastard though, rains a lot and freezing in the winter. Overall quite happy to live here, but as we're still stuck in the UK and the current British government can't even wipe its arse without doing something awful I'm considering moving to Denmark or something, but who knows we'll see how things go.
I'm glad you bright up the pig mask jumpscares, when this game came out I wanted to like it so badly that I was sorta in denial about it for awhile, but once I experienced the gmod horror map tier jumpscares that finally broke me.
I was always a bit of a Machine for Pigs apologist because I loved the acting writing and concept. But I can't help but love how you absolutely lay into it here, and you're right on all accounts. I wonder if a modder has ever tried to fix its shortcomings by de-nerfing the enemies, remaking some of the maps to be more open, and fixing the lighting and lighting mechanics. I hope you played Rebirth, Soma, and The Bunker, they're all excellent.
Re: monsters disappearing in The Dark Descent - To this day, I think it's one of the most brilliant parts of that game's design. I remember dying twice to the same encounter, thinking "okay, I've got this", only to be unsettled when he didn't show up the third time... until a different spot. The game understands that repetition is the enemy of tension. While its solutions aren't complex "AI director" level stuff, it's a smart, efficient game, and I love it. Too bad about Machine for Pigs. I appreciate the ambition, but that entry will forever serve as a useful lesson in horror design missteps.
It's a very exploitable mechanic when you figure it out. Throwing Daniel at every threat to remove them from the play made the game much easier, especially areas like the Choir.
Pretty much all of enemy encounters in Amnesia DD are scripted and easily controllable. So much so, that once you've memorized the scripted events and monster behaviour during the aforementioned events, you'd have to go out of your way to be actively chased/killed by them. I've pretty much learned this while I was doing 100% achievements on Steam - trying to beat the game on Hard, so on and so forth. You can find numerous numbers of guides on the matter or strategies for speed running explaining these things - monsters in Amnesia DD are completely predictable and very easily to control, kite, or "despawn" them all together. And there's zero randomness to it either. Once again, once you've learned that, you'd have to do things "wrong" on purpose, if you want monsters to chase you around and whatnot. Monsters in Amnesia DD are extremely primitive in terms of their execution, even though devs masterfully managed to make it seem otherwise. Especially if it's a first or a blind playthrough.
@@ANDELE3025 I realize that this might be simply a preferential thing, but I fully disagree. A good horror game has just as much replay value as any other non-session based game. Because yeah, it's kinda difficult to top roguelikes, arena shooters or some MMO/ARPG games in terms of sheer replayability potential. However, I replay Alien Isolation every few years, just the same as I do with, let's say, Fallout New Vegas. Now, if we're talking about "generic-Steam-indie-horror-jumpscare-galore" kind of horror game, then yeah, I'd be inclined to agree. The point is, the better horror game's (or any game, for that matter) AI is directed or even orchestrated, the less it feels like a mindless spooky ride at the amusement park. Kinda helps with the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing, too, which is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold. Doesn't matter if it's your first playthrough or a fifth one, either.
The ending speech of the game is quite powerful, I'm not gonna lie it reminds me of blade runner, that famous “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" line.
I remember writing a walkthrough for this game. I had to brighten every screenshot through Photoshop with some radical settings otherwise 90% of them were just dark black with some suggestions of lighter black.
Mandus's VA activated core memories when I heard him but i didn't realize why until I looked it up and saw it's Tobey Longworth, who narrates a bunch of Warhammer 40k audiobooks, including the Gaunt's Ghosts series
I've never played this, but had already seen the ending and knew a rough idea of the story. That last monologue had formed my assumption of the entire game's quality, and I was really looking forward to Mandy reviewing it. Man.
That ending monolog has stayed in my brain since my first and only time playing the game when I was 15. That was easily one of the most affecting moments in a game I had experienced... it's pure horror, without being "scary".
The ending monologue while you're moving up the machine to shut it down is the one thing that stuck with me after this game. It's one of the few upfront sections that doesn't hide behind notes, or metaphor. It just upfront reminds you why you started this process and the damnation you condemn others to for stopping this far in. It also frames the murder of his children as potentially a mercy killing instead of a sacrifice. Saving them from seeing the horror of war, and seeing their innocence get turned into pigs, I mean guilt.
I remember the trailer for this game was amazing. Player closing the door and hiding in the room, and then screaming pig bashing on the door. I thought to myself "oh man its dark descent but with england and scary pig monsters!" and oh boy was it not it.
For the lack of features and gameplay elements, and everything else the Chinese room got wrong, the climax with mandus going into the machine, the music, the story... Every time it makes me feel something
It's one of the few games I can think of where I would recommend the whole game if just for the last five minutes. The final speech and accompanying soundtrack was really beautifully delivered. Maybe one of my favorite monologues in fiction.
@@DetectiveOlivawWriters only success is to ruin a great delivery once you think about it (or by their own words, shit themselves and ejaculate over their own excretions over the streets). A evil ghost orb that merged itself into a factory that never experienced reality (or self-seethe from split personality that 100% isnt just a writers self insert commie WW1 loss rant copy) trying to argue over humanity when it itself isnt human yet does the crimes worse is retard writing.
@@googleforcedhandleExactly. The Chinese Room does not understand how to make a good or compelling game in any way. It makes me wonder why this was even a video game and not just a short film.
You have no clue how much joy you gave me with those S.W.I.N.E. cutscenes. It’s one of the last Hungarian games that left a cultural footprint in this country that can still be felt today. Me and my dad have been quoting unit lines from it since 2008, and most people Ive met at my age still remember them.
Absolutely phenomenal review. Your sections reviewing sound design and music since the first reviews have been so eye opening to media for me, and has helped me appreciate games and film so much more! It's like learning to see colours that weren't there before, but maybe it's just me who used to not pay too close attention to it after all these years. Your videos go into such detail that things I would normally miss get both explained and shown through ingame footage, which is something a lot of other reviews don't do. Maybe I'm spoiled by your coverage and work, but I super appreciate when you include segments that show off sound effects and music for more than a brief stint. Also LOVE to see when you include art from the community, the aztec artwork is PHENOMENAL!!!
It's so interesting coming back to this now that Still Wakes the Deep has released. They are still using the 'spooky detector' flashlight but the world has much more interaction and there are actual chase scenes. It feels like they learned a good deal of lessons but also ignored a few others.
Well, yeah, if you look at "interactive experience" as the genre they're exploring, then they've been tuning and improving the formula. An outright movie doesn't care for your mood or preference - it goes at its own pace. An interactive experience allows you to linger in the moment: stick around the mess and listen to the banter, or walk out onto the outer deck and stare at the waves for a few minutes if you so desire, or rush ahead, if that's what's on your mind. You can experience the same story a bit differently every time, and be present in the situation much more palpably. If judged purely form the perspective of gameplay systems, because it's technically a videogame - then it's still kinda barren. Though, I don't think it's just them failing to create an engaging game. I think, they're catering to a different, less established (right now, anyway) palate. Like, Alien: Isolation has a lot of palpable atmosphere, and is more of a "game" game, but I can imagine a certain crowd that would avoid it for that very reason. But anyway, that is my long-winded way of saying "I find it apt that you said "ignored" and not "failed to learn"." Cheers.
After seeing the most recent previews and then your own analysis of A Machine for Pigs, It'll be interesting to see how far The Chinese Room's come when we *Finally* get VTMB2... If we get it this year. It's not exactly the first time Paradox has said "oh yeah guys, it'll be THIS year."
Yeah, Paradox sucks. Also hey Charlatan, big fan of your videos, thanks to you I have several games I know I can't play out of fear of never seeing the sun again XD
They also have that game “Still Wakes the Deep” coming out this year. The premise is great. I don’t really know why but setting a horror game on an oil rig is very unsettling to me. I swear I have nightmares of floating at sea and just seeing a deep sea oil rig in the distance.
when i first played the game, i thought the final monologue said "they will eat your ass" instead of "they will eat your hearts" and was VERY confused. i think that was the final straw that got me to start playing with subtitles
@@jelqsensei No one helping me or my kin out. Why should I help them when I'm under attack? London is getting what it deserves. They didn't welcome in the Trojan Horse. They welcomed the Trojans and claimed the gift would come later.
Thank you so much for this comment. That clip intrigued me so much and I never would have known what it was without this. Watched the film last night and it was an absolute masterpiece.
About the Shadow not appearing, the devs at The Chinese Room felt like the shadow was a bad part of TDD experience. Quote: "The Shadow isn't in the game definitely. To be honest with you, it was always my least favourite thing in TDD - human evil is scary, supernatural pan-dimensional beasties just... less. I really wanted the Shadow to just be a product of Daniel's imagination, it felt like a bit of a cop-out that it was real. There's an amazing short story called The Lonesome Place by August Derleth - if you ever get a chance to read it, you'll understand what I mean... So I didn't want any actual creatures that were not a product of the world and Mandus' brain in the game" However, The Shadow is not a part of Daniel's imagination as it is a real entity, later showed again in Rebirth and The Bunker.
I'm disappointed you didn't mention the OTHER god-tier ending monolog, the one at the very end, after Mandus sacrifices himself. "I lay there, and watched the God I had created die. At the end, when we were cold as the stone we had hewn his body from, when the lights were nearly all extinguished, we heard, in the silent distance, the man-pigs singing to one another. Then, as the last lights were gone, and we lay together in the deep, they drifted away, and all was silent. Such a silence I have never known. And as the dust settled on my open eyes, and we lay together embraced forever, I heard, miles above us, the sounds of the city turning over in its sleep. A church bell ringing out. And in that moment, the new century was born."
My hope is thats because he knows it, just like the prior monologue, is merely pretentious, pointless and carried again by the music. In reality, its likely so that he doesnt spoil it for people that get immersed by the music and delivery enough to not think about what is actually happening in narrative during the speech.
When the trailers for this game dropped, my friend and I comforted ourselves by speculating wholesome things the "machine for pigs" would do. Like maybe it's a machine that fits pigs with little wigs and tophats. We're very unpopular people.
I'll have to re-watch the first 6 minutes. From the start all I could do was try to recall where I heard the intro music, and after six minutes it finally hit me. Thank you Mandy! I've been looking forward to watching this review from you!
@@SamsButterscotch It's Beware the Forest Mushrooms, but I also saw Mandy lists the songs used at the end of the video, which I forgot about earlier. So many creators don't list the songs used, it's great that he does.
oh im so glad you agree on the monologue xD damn I was worried you wouldnt bring it up, but yeah THAT bit, makes this game, holyhell it gives me chills every time.
@@joshuaspaulding2978 Engineer is either a copy/different version of the Amnesia Orbs (so leftover/portal connection/power link of a eldritch whatever kaiju; essentially plot coupon) or a split part of Ozzy Mandys soul/spirit (or whatever other interpretation of eldritch orb induced schizophrenia essentially). Which means no matter which way, the POV of the speech is either a fake prophetic spirit spouting nonsense (as it in the very game and equivalents were explicitly wrong prior) that never experienced anything of the world beyond aztec jungles or just the protagonists evil size ramblings thinking the world will end after killing his sons in a bout of madness. The dialogue only makes any sense if you apply it from a generous modern day perspective/the writer speaking to the players instead of characters in narrative because its either from a source which isnt prophetic or is the delusions of a criminal that killed his kids and did horrible experiments on the poor and downtrodden that the church was supposed to help. Also the same writers wrote about people getting off in the streets while shitting themselves and how if only the evils of religion, capitalism and culture were destroyed the world could be better (while in irony using Trotsky and post first revolution communist failure quotes as if they were good messages) so for anyone not just doing a basic glance over its expected.
@@ANDELE3025 The machine is explicitly given sentience by the broken half of Mandus' soul (which was absorbed by the orb, used to create the machine) and Mandus supplying it with his blood. None of its predictions are untrue; they are all direct references to events that took place in the real-world 20th century. If you think the game is just "capitalism bad" then you weren't paying attention. Hell, Mandy even specifically points out that Mandus effectively hates everyone and everything, the machine wants to destroy the entire *planet* by "cracking the egg" at the core, and any excuses about the how's and why's of what he's doing are just that - excuses. Keep in mind, the machine largely only references totalitarian Communist states in its ranting at the end, so the game condemns both capitalism *and* totalitarian communism. Mandus was in a bad place after his wife's death, encountering the orb convinced him to do something to make things a whole lot worse, and it left him in a sort of fugue state where the "evil half" of his soul was taking over and guiding him. It was only after he relinquished that half of his soul to awaken the machine (and, apparently, after a good wank in front of the mirror) that the "good" half of him woke up and realized he had to stop it. Mandy also covers this in the video.
@@dc8836 The orb gave him visions of his kids dying in WW1, which couldnt happen if he sacrificed them to the orb which was the prerequisite for its visions as was the success of the factory to effectively end humanity, so no, all of its visions were explicitly wrong. Also no, it cries "no true communism", not that communism is bad, because it very much does promote commie nonsense both through actually shitty dialogue AND ITS OPENING AND END CREDITS. You are free to read secondary causes into the story, but those are products of your fiction and not facts of the narrative (which is either Ozzys eldritch induced schizo or a copy of the og amensia localized eldritch kaiju orb that didnt even have the benefit of ever seeing anything of the world outside of a single aztec temple and both have no context for the stair monologue) per which the writing itself is nonsense that relies on the idea of the player only thinking of it as meta narrative to them instead of through the in universe content, which is a fundamental writing failure.
I almost wanted to say "the one minute speech is worth the four hours drag", but the speech is better if the pig metaphor in it is the first one you hear instead of the gazillionth. [edit] Oh God those guys are in charge for Bloodlines 2
There is a reason most fans of VTMB have basically given up and called the game dead on arrival. Like the only thing going for them is that the previous developers did some shitty stuff and were clearly going over budget.
These guys aren't in charge of Bloodlines. Mostly because by my understanding the studio has had a near complete turnover. The new devs mostly do mobile games. So it is a different set of issues.
@@Guymanbot97 Founder of TCR fired everyone in 2017 or so, then Sumo Digital acquired them the year after, they started bringing on more people and the founder left soon after. No one who had a hand in Machine for Pigs is at that studio anymore. TCR is still working on VTMB2.
that final monologue, man. "a child's shadow burned into the brickwork" chinese room might be terrible at gameplay, but my GOD this is one of the rawest lines i've ever heard in any videogame.
It's especially genius to have the machine predicting the future from a historical setting since we all know what all atrocities actually took place in the century to follow. It really elevates it above a typical "humans are evil and do bad things!" doomposting monologue that villains sometimes give.
i LOVE how Ross Scott's fight is just ORGANICALLY being picked up by people everywhere. we just need to add the message in every single last video until we're either won or lost this fight
Sadly, Ross Scott committed the most heinous of crimes: He directly threatened the gov't monopoly on a thing (in this case power over the market, but it really doesn't matter what, just that it happened), and will therefore remain in prison likely until his final days. My heart goes out to his Mother and all who hold him dear.
The guys that made this game just released a new short horror game set on a Scottish oil rig and focused around UK labor policy and Lovecraftian eldritch horrors beyond man’s comprehension and it is shockingly good actually
I had to pause the video for a sec and got a surprise mirror when the frame I stopped on was pitch black. Really, I appreciate the jump scares of this review.
God i love ur videos bc generally i listen to them as i work and when 20:58 you mentioned the mexican temple i went “OH NO MARATHON” and opened up my phone to see Pathways into darkness
15:00 What's funny is I distinctly remember an indie horror game that came out around 2011-2013 era called like "blackwater hospital" or something which has a sequence where you go to the next chapter after escaping the monster by running into the 'forbidden basement'. The next area starts with the monster pounding on the door you just came through and if you wait like a solid 1-2 minutes it bashes through the door and comes after you even though if you proceeded normally you'd already be onto the next monster. Funny how independent developers flying by the seat of their pants entirely fueled by inspiration alone can create so much more than an organized well oiled machine of pi- I mean humans
What a great review, Mando. Thanks for the hard work! This review brings back to my mind why A Machine for Pigs has never been a lasting thing in the Amnesia community.
One of my favourite plot moments in this game is where in those notes Mandus talks about the "product" (apparently pigs, right?) processing on his factory in great details. And then it turns out that all this time he talked about humans, and the fact that all those processing details were not ablut pigs is almost impossible to pick up from those notes early on due to how they're written.
YES I’m so glad you uploaded this, I’ve been looking forward to your insight on the series’s downward curve ever since you uploaded the Penumbra video.
I don't usually like horror games, since by their nature they're filled with jumpscares. The kind of horror I like is existential. Which is why this is one of my favorite horror games, right behind Soma. The fact that the same studio made two games with two of the most terrifying ends to a video game is honestly incredible.
There's a term for World War One, the Seminole Tragedy. A tragedy so horrible, that we can never go back to how the world used to be. If you could see that coming, and you had the means to end humanity instead of allowing such suffering, would you honestly allow it to happen?
STOPKILLINGGAMES.COM
Amnesia on GOG - gog.la/forgetjuice
I really don't want to think about pigs again for a few weeks.
I would like to recommend 'Where the Water Tastes Like Wine'.
I'll never forgive Ubi for axing The Crew
oink oink Mandy
Would you feel better with some BBQ? Some Brisket? Pulled Chicken? or perhaps you'd like some....
Just FYI to everyone - this effort is being done by Accursed Farms' Ross Scott.
He is the creator and voice artist for the Freeman's mind series, runs a show called Ross's Game dungeon (if you like Mandy's channel i can almost garuntee you'll like it) and is fighting to give us consumers and game-enjoyers the right to play our games after the publisher arbitrarily decides to cut support for it.
I HIGHLY recommend you all go check out his latest video, and the entire channel, Accursed Farms. I don't think you'll be disappointed!
In what can only be considered a thematic masterstroke, the action that ultimately causes our main character to try and undo his wrongs is to squeeze his hog.
I never thought of this. Everything really is a pig reference.
Haha, you're right
He truly saved himself by pulling his pork.
Mandy vids have some great fucking comments haha
Ozzy, squeeze my hog!
I don't want to derail the Amnesia misery, but thanks for the mention! The more more people are able to file complaints, the better the odds we can get agencies' attention on killing games.
@Accursed_Farms I know it can't be easy, but you're doing an outstanding job, good sir!
Ayo
I cant do much on the front but I sent your video and website link to every group i know
Yep! I figured putting it in a regular video would be the best way to get more eyes on it. We can email again if you need anything else from me.
Thank you for everything you do, Ross!
"Man, this game is so dark."
"Yeah, it has some pretty crazy themes huh?"
"No, I mean I literally cant see whats happening, this game is extremely dark"
Having the main antagonist be a gigantic sentient aztec sacrifical automaton/meat processor with PTSD was certainly an original concept, yes
Pffffffff, what? That's practically a villain archetype at this point
Probably the only thing I liked about this game. I'm done with walking simulators. It's hard to have fun when a game has basically no mechanics to speak of. Or puzzles.
I loved the idea, but was disappointed by how little we actually got to see of the titular machine. Early concept arts had these blood soaked processing lines with torsos on meat hooks and whatnot, but in the game you mostly just see drab corridors and pipes. (When you see anything at all that is, since it's so dark all the time.) You rarely feel in danger, even though you are allegedly crawling through the guts of a machine made for turning you into sausage. And where's all the meat?
Pre-traumatic stress disorder
@@Ohio.Gozaimasu I've one person say of A Machine for Pigs, it's a game with a story so good it would've been much better off as a book instead of a videogame...
>Moshi moshi?
>Precious eagle cactus fruit. Help us.
Beautiful dialogue. Anime of the year.
I know I'm going to catch some hate from the sub community but I really appreciate the dubs here, they casted the perfect voice actor ;)
>NANII?!!
I've used this sentence to Troll Telemarketers before!
Other classics: City Morgue ' You stab'em, we slab'em'
Or
CITY WOK. YOU WAN CITY CHICKEN?
@@PyovaliListed as pewdiepee in the CCs.
@@Claymann71 I do "This is Frank's BBQ. We'll pull your pork!" Nobody wants their pork tugged. :(
You weren't joking about how dark the game was. I'm sitting here trying to watch this on my phone at work and I'm just staring at my reflection most of the video
Sometimes I wonder if the game is trying to call the players pigs indirectly too.
@@MandaloreGaming I guess the machine for pigs... is the phones we use
My condolences that you had to stare at your face that long. These are truly troubling times.
The machine for pigs was the friends we made along the way@kezyka6775
Same 5 hours left on da shift
On reflection, Halligan would probably be able to solve the Amnesia series. Briggs would probably be needed for the Bunker, admittedly.
Briggs would conquer the bunker and become the king of bunker
Halligan is a walking horror story. He would have found ways to make what the antagonists did in each game look like a joke with little to no effort on his part.
@@tomtheconqerurHalligan's solution to stopping Alexander would have been to somehow impersonate him and ruin his reputation with his lover / wife so badly she'd leave him so he doesn't have any reason to return home anymore
Halligan would chase the Pig Monsters for a piece of bacon, while Briggs will fix the machine and start the pig revolution.
@@baransevim3969Briggs is like King from One Punch Man, he's getting the credit that should be going to Saitama. If you play through the Limbo of the Lost, you realize that the person who calls the shots and clears most of the puzzles is actually you, there are times where he's insane logic actually works (trapping the Soul Taker), but most of the thinking and doing is actually done by you, including the part that involves saving him in the last level.
He just gets the credit because he's the talking head.
1:36 "What is the machine and what is it for?" It's for pigs Mandy, it says it right there
Puzzlingly obvious oversight really
"Oh, really? I must've had an amnesia..."
Cant believe he calls himself a video James gournalist
Define "Pig".
@@kirill9064 exactly
"The doom he foresaw wasn't some Lovecraftian nightmare, it was just the future" goes so hard.
Yeah, that's pretty wild. The life we are all living RIGHT now and the world we live in is so horrifying to a person of the past that they decide it would be better to just blow up the planet than let that happen. I honestly feel a lot of trepidation for the future. It seems the world is gearing up for WW3, Germany says that Russia will attack NATO in the next 5 years and their army will be twice its current size in 2 years European countries bordering Russia are bringing back conscription. The US keeps trying to make it so they can draft women. China seems determined to eventually attack Taiwan, which the US says they will use nukes to defend. Global warming has already gone past the point of no return it is no longer possible to avoid the worst events. In 20 years the equator will shift southward making it impossible to farm in the current equator which is were 90% of the worlds food is grown. Anywhere higher than Germany on the equator will become unlivable arctic wastelands. My sister shared a theory to me about why Russia is attacking the Ukraine is actually because global warming will make Russia nigh unlivable and Ukraine is further south and is also where a pretty hefty chunk of the worlds grain is grown. Russia is fleeing the coming climate apocalypse by invading their southern neighbors. TLDR we are all so fucked
the future is lovecraftian in and of itself
As cliche as it is at this point, "You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension."
@@collinmclaren6608no it’s not
These horrors are entirely within our comprehension. That’s much of the point
@@collinmclaren6608 Dude... so close...
I'm at a weird place where that final monologue from the Engineer is more impactful than anything in The Dark Descent, but almost everything else is so subpar that I'll choose The Dark Descent every time without even having to think about it.
Sometimes people say about AAA games "could've been a movie", this one honestly feels like it could've been a book.
As a game it's basically a walking sim, and the story doesn't really make sense when you look at it too closely, but to be fair, thematically it stuck with me in a way other Amnesia games didn't. The ending is haunting, poetic, and resonates deeply. The writing of the closing monologues is some of the tightest I've seen, and still gives me goosebumps when I find myself thinking back on them. It lingered with me for a long time.
It's a shame those moments are little more than bright sparks in an otherwise quite needlessly dull and drab and perplexing experience.
someone took a lot of drugs and wrote down "people are just pigs dude" then came back later and made a game out of it
none of it is thought through and the basic premise is never expanded upon so I can only imagine that's what happened
Or they are just incompetent writers
@@Arkangel630 please share with us your portfolio of award winning game development
@@Arkangel630 Congratulations, you missed the whole story and theme.
Within it is the manic obsessions with realizing systems exploit people for nothing but the benefit of the machine itself. Capitalism, industrialism, class structure, extractionism, imperialism, colonialism, organized religion, and so on. Systems that benefit a very few, but ultimately horrors that are carried out not because it'll centralize power more to those specific people, but because they are necessary for the system itself to survive. The driving force behind these atrocities isn't limitless greed, it's survival. It's not driven by any human at the top, it is purely mechanical by the system itself.
Then upon realizing that, humans will build new systems to usurp the old ones they see as corrupt, but merely end up recreating similar systems because certain means have to justify its ends, and because exploitation and its mechanisms is all these humans have known, it's what they know how to recreate.
It's a criticism of cultural revolutionary ideas that instead of abandoning systems altogethether, merely turns the system on its head to target the new perceived threat. Even a system like that aimed at "the rich" or "the church", ultimately sees the same previously poor and downtrodden sacrificed in the process, because it's ultimately anger aimed at the past and its cruelties, not then hope for a better future. That last part is just the justification.
It's very good framing to have this from the perspective of an industrial capitalist who is the kind of person who has the means to create new systems, and thus is the one to enforce his reality onto society as a whole, regardless of how flawed and emotionally driven it truly is. He is already "the elite" that he claims to be against, but also sees himself as better equipped to fix the world than anyone else who doesn't have his(inherited) means, and just like the people he claims to be against, will use the poor as fuel for his own personal revolution, and thus participates in the same dehumanization that he critiques other institutions for.
The story and theming is excellent, and what we should be mentioning when talking about why writing in video games is important, but like mandalore pointed out, it's still quite flawed in executing these themes properly, sometimes being too blunt or forceful with its metaphors, so my interpretation of its writing is more what I would like to imagine the game is trying to examine, not so much what it actually does or how well it does it. There's good writing attached, but it's quite telling that this good writing is only really apparent from actual plain text, so it's not really translated into the video game medium.
I've never seen a studio more aggressively against the idea of making a _videogame_ than Chinese Room.
When the only tool you have is a gigantic Lovecraftian butchering machine, then everyone you see starts to look like bacon.
Most problems turn into bacon with appropriate processing, yes
As a game it's basically a walking sim, and the story doesn't really make sense when you look at it too closely, but to be fair, thematically it stuck with me in a way other Amnesia games didn't. The ending is haunting, poetic, and resonates deeply. The writing of the closing monologues is some of the tightest I've seen, and still gives me goosebumps when I find myself thinking back on them. It lingered with me for a long time.
It's a shame those moments are little more than bright sparks in an otherwise quite needlessly dull and drab and perplexing experience.
"If I were to put you into a meat grinder..."
@@Blisterdude123It feels like this game is less interested in making you feel fear than it is in making you feel dread. Short term scares and danger are an afterthought because they don’t want you to worry about what’s hiding in the dark, they want you to worry about what’s coming in the future. By that same token, I admire it as an experimental game and a piece of storytelling but I don’t necessarily like it.
>By definition, friction is rough, it resists you. You know what friction also makes? Heat! It might also make sparks. And if you don't have heat, you're not gonna cook. That means the pork Machine For Pigs brought to my dinner party is cold cut Oscar Meyer. And that pork is made with chicken. This is Chicken Gameplay.
Truly an all-timer
It is one of the quotes of all time.
eyy dreadanon
Yooooo dreadanon! Love your vids
@@alejandrorivas4585 AND I LOVE YOU RANDOM CITIZEN
Thank you for repeating word for word what's already being said in the video. Truly the comment of all time.
big credit for shouting out stopkillinggames Ross Scott is doing lord's work and seeing him being able to organize something with real possibility to succeed when he's been talking about the issue for so long without there being anything to grasp on to is fantastic.
13:45 "youre the monster. You're not allowed to run away. COME BACK HERE AND SCARE ME"
Quick note about statement regarding indigenous pigs in the Americas, from around 25 minutes. Old world pigs were introduced with Cortez, but javelinas/peccaries are a new world variety of pigs that are native to the Americas.
That's why the mc was holding his peccary when he decided to undo it all.
ah that makes sense.
Those are some cute pigs
"Oswald Mandus" is a name I'd expect out of a parody walking simulator. "This is Oswald Mandus, his wife Sara Thustra and his best friend Kirk Zees."
First thing I thought when the name was mentioned. I was like hang on are we not gonna acknowledge how outrageously eye-roll inducing that is? Vidya game writing y'all.
Right in line with Hugh Mungus. And my own username, ffs.
I do not understand, can anyone explain?
Non native english speaker here, is Oswald Mandus a pun ? Or is it just a ridiculously old-timey name ?
[edit] thank you all ! So yeah that name has the subtlety of a cinderblock.
@@francisaustere1879 Oswald Mandus > Ozzy Mandus > Ozymandias
"Almost like a graphical bug."
Yes, the "blue fog bug" which relates to the "color grading" option, basically adds a layer of colored fog with each new level that loads in.
It has been there since the beginning and can only be removed with a new mod that you can find on nexusmods.
With it, the game looks like a remastered version.
Removing bad features from old games is peak modding, really.
Bless modder who make games more playable and weird
I was kinda surprised he didn't mention any kind of modding to see if it helped with the visuals. Yeah, I know its kind of a cop-out, because it's obviously working as the devs intended, but I might've been nice for him to try out that Mod on Nexus to see if it helped. I kinda wish I'd know about it now.
@bilalsadiq1450 there's not a lot of mods to fix the game as far as I'm aware.
Mandalore covered at least four other games where mods fix em. There's likely hundreds of games that get fixed up by a dedicated player base. @@peppermillers8361
God that ending monologue had no right to be as hard as it was props to the voice cast for it's stellar delivery.
only realized now, Oswald Mandus. Ozzy Mandus. Gaze upon my works ye mighty and despair. goddamnit!
"'I will chase at him!' said the Pigsmen as he chased John Amnesia.
John Amnesia laterned the greasy Pigsmen. But the ceiling fell and they were trapped and unable to chase or lantern.
"No I must lantern the pigmens!" John Amnesia shouted
The telephone said "No John. You are the pigsmens."
And then John Amnesia was A Machine for Pigs."
Superb, encore
First they called the rich pigs, and I agreed because I am not rich man.
Then they called politicians pigs, and I agreed because I am not a politician.
Then they called the capitalists pigs, and I agreed because I am not a capitalist.
Then they called me a pig. Oink oink
I read this in the exact same cadence as Half-Life: Full Life Consequences, which I hope was the intention.
@@MrEGTFIts a reference to the ending of DOOM: Repercussions of Evil
@@macgeorge8229 Ahh, man, that's the one! I had completely blanked that from my memory but re-reading it now it's a blast from the dial-up past.
31:28 ...Post nut clarity as start of an attempted redemption arc.
I was just going to make a "That'll Do, Mandy. That'll do." joke, but THAT'S a new character origin even for my horror rotted brain.
Hey, man, sometimes it's what you need to get going in the morning.
What a second of post-nut clarity does to a MF.
Appropriate given his fondness for pigs
And then that subtle pause on “he…came to his senses”
i mean, it wasn’t redemption in his case (at all) (at allllllllllllllll), but Frank Cotton’s origins ARE at the very least post nut clarity lmao
According to wikipedia "Frictional Games wanted to further the Amnesia franchise, but had no time for it. Later, they met Dan Pinchbeck of The Chinese Room at GDC Europe 2011, where the plan for the game began to form. It was originally intended by The Chinese Room to be a small mod, but it was expanded to a larger scale project when "the two companies realized what could be achieved with a larger game" "
This game is essentially a mod elevated by the developers to sequel status.
That's not necessarily a bad thing--there are a lot of great games that started out as mods.
Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, GMod, Rocket League, Killing Floor, Rising Storm, DayZ, etc all started as/trace lineage to mods as well. It CAN work out in the hands of skilled people with a unified vision.
@@RubyRoksDayZ? **canned laughter**
The Chinese Room wanted to tell a story, but they didn't want to write a book, and they couldn't make a movie, so they released a videogame.
@@Intestine_Ballin-ism DayZ's problem was there was too many different versions of mods which split the community who have their own version of DayZ.
That Aztec artwork is sick as fuck, wanna see the whole pantheon done in that style.
I find the presentation of the Machine's motivation really interesting. Normally, the ancient beings form beyond are shown treating mortal lives as insignificant. But, here, we have an ancient being, who encounters death very rarely, react the scale of death at the Somme as mind-shattering horror. The machine isn't some unknowable thing with ancient purpose - it's simply gone mad.
I think it's more of Oswald's own horror, machine (or eldritch influence) just coaxed him into making it real. Judging by the fact that machine itself eats people and it turned Oswald's reason inside out (to save people you must kill at least 90% of them... What?) It probably has no qualms about human suffering.
Now that's an idea. Eldritch beings looking at us and going mad.
Which I think is a bit odd, because absolutely, things like wwi or even ii weren’t nearly as proportionally devastating as previous centuries. They are just visually more bombastic because of the scale of the entire system was larger with planes and machinegubs and stuff. A war between two tribes will often kill and cause more people to suffer proportionally then ww1 would. the difference between 200/1000 and 1million/10million. Then not also focus on universal education or the rise of penicillin. If you focus on numbers instead of relativity, you can make anything seem any way.
But I guess its a dramatic setup anyways. I just wish more peices of media tried to engage with the concept of relativity when talking about more abstract concepts like progress.
@@InternetHydra Honestly, I've had something similar brewing for the setting I've been working on.
In this setting, massive terraforming machines called Titans were conditioned to enjoy cultivating worlds into being suitable for Earthly life, with a desire to see intelligent life flourish in their gardens, enabling their creators to expand across a greening galaxy. However, the Titans were hijacked by a nefarious force that stood in opposition to the values of the Titans' creators, forcing the Titans to watch on in horror as their bodies committed atrocities against their creators. Many shut down their sensory systems, choosing instead to wallow in the memories of better times, while others went mad before they could take that blissful plunge into eternal dreaming.
The force that hijacked the Titans was eventually destroyed, cast down by a coalition of peoples who would later be known as the Elder Races, but the damage was done. Practically all Titans born before the hijacking were traumatized to varying degrees; some just wanted to return to what they enjoyed, while others flew directly into the nearest stars, resolved to escape the horrid memories that they could never be rid of. And then there were those who could no longer trust anything that could potentially violate them, as the hijackers once did. In many cases, this mistrust manifested as a grim wariness of any civilization that lived in their gardens, but there were many Titans who had also lost their empathy for sentients altogether, willing to commit genocide if they suspected civilizations of developing technology that would let them assert control over the Titans. In a tragic twist of irony, the hostility of certain Titans provided a grim impetus for societies to pursue such avenues of research, for even the mightiest of interstellar empires could not combat the Titans conventionally.
But despite everything that had happened, there were Titans who could not abide the thought of permitting genocide, even with the dread of another hijacking present in their darkest thoughts, and thus began the War in Heaven. Those Titans who still cherished sapients were driven to combat their mad siblings and cousins, turning the galaxy into a dark forest gripped by war. Space was no longer safe to traverse as this war raged across the millennia, and the Elder Races were forced to fall back on the narrow Backroads of old, making risky journeys between dimensions in order to travel from world to world. Despite clinging on as best they could, the empires of the Elder Races fell into decline as reality became more and more hostile, as beings that once cultivated bountiful gardens now battled over the fate of intelligent life itself, all while haunted by the memory of being prisoners in their own possessed bodies.
@@InternetHydra I could swear there's an story out there that is about that: an immortal being from outside reality who, by its own nature, does not know death and even lacks the concept of "stopping to exist". Hence, when it sees how humans do not question their fate to die, and are perfectly willing to kill other living beings or other members of their own kind, it is horrified.
Again, I could swear there's a story like that, but I can't remember the name or anything beyond what I said.
They must have amnesia, they forgot that I’m pigs.
We smoking straight DUNG BEETLE 🪲
Smoked a new pig, his meat came right off the bone
I don't give a shit if I go blind, I don't need to see the pig mask anyway
In and out of the machine, straight fundamentals. No piggy business.
What is this? a Machine for pigs?
I love how the subtitle for markiplier's ''what' is pewdiepie
That food analogy comment made me realise Mandalore has never actually made a food analogy in his videos until now.
Edit : I looked back, he did make a food comparison with adventure games and dairy products in his Blade Runner the game review.
Side note: Are food analogies bad? I've heard someone say so years ago, but I have little context.
He's from /v/ and /v/ hates food analogies more than anything.
In his Warhammer 40K Fire Warrior review he makes a visual analogy of walking through vents sounding like a crinkling crisp packet
Oh no we have reached DSPGaming comparison levels now. Lmao.
@@TheAsylumCatthey are usually the first and most simple ones and I’m pretty sure it’s what teachers use to teach children about analogies. A bit like comparing everything to sex I suppose. IF I WERE TO USE A FOOD ANALOGY: It’s a bit like processed food. Simple, cheap and no nutrition.
Fun fact: Mandus is voiced by Toby Longworth, one of the best audiobook readers for Warhammer’s Black Library. And having listened to plenty of the books he’s narrated, I’m not surprised that the voice acting is one of the strong suits of this game. The man has some serious talent.
he's also the dude who voiced the funny green alien senator from Phantom Menace, which is a really funny juxtaposition in my mind
TOBY LONGWORTH'S LEGENDARY VOICE MENTIONED
@@michaelmiller7928 While we’re at it, I must shout out my personal favorite narrator, and one that is severely underrated, David Timson. His ability to portray quiet desperation, fear, confusion, despair, and horror in his voice is second to none. The quiet whispers send chills down my spine every time. Fulgrim, Legion, Angel Exterminatus, they’re all fantastic. (And he’s my personal head canon voice for Fulgrim.)
He played Judge drokkin' Dredd in the big finish audiodramas for Dredd stories, and also the videogame.
You promised a fun fact and then told me something about cringehammer. I want my money back.
35:49
"Sometimes, it feels like we really do rip our own hearts out sometimes."
Man, I can really feel the exhaustion from the gameplay with that one.
The entire game is so very 5/10, but that final monologue, with and without story context, is an easy 11/10 with that music
"I have stood knee deep in mud and bone, and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved. This is your coming century! They will EAT them Mandus! They will make pigs of you all, and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will EAT. YOUR. HEARTS."
This is what pol was trying to tell us all along.
The prose is kinda purple and flowery but it gets the point.
Norm Macdonald stood amidst the blood and bones, too.
11/10 on the scale of pretentious edginess, maybe
The music entirely carries the scene.
Because once you remove the music, your brain will 100% start to actually listen to the dialogue as a whole and contextually associate "who is saying this and why"? and you realize "oh its pointless and just a schizo creator self insert post WW1 commie fail rant re-phrasing".
The ending cinematic, with the speech and music, still gives me goosebumps.
Was looking for this comment. My nibba.
It would of the overdramatic music didn't threaten to overpower the scene. Chinese Room really haven't heard of the word "restraint".
@@PANCAKEMINEZZyou couldn’t be more wrong. Jessica Curry’s legendary composition is one of the best accompaniments to the already fantastic final monologue. You have no clue what you’re talking about. AMFP’s flaws are almost all development and design based; The Chinese Room’s poor influence ends at that. You just have unimaginably shit taste I’m sorry dude
It's the only part of the game I remember whenever it comes up, it's really damn good.
The music downed out the words at points, so I couldn't hear everything he said. And there's no audio options...
"If you call for gruesome, violent revolution where you live, but can't make eye contact with the delivery driver" is a HELL of a quote
Describes a good chunk of internet communists
@@PowerUA-camrViewer I was half thinking about that and half thinking about 4chan fascists/neo nazis/incels tbh
I don't see leftists calling for violent revolution often. I see conservatives calling for violence every single literal day.
@@amovy031it’s describes anyone who’s politics are completely internet based.
@@Jimbo55151 facts
I once saw a UA-camr play Machine for Pigs so calmly that he killed any fear I had in the game. He was dealing with the same task at 14:46, and the UA-camr just very patiently completed it, thus revealing that he was never in any actual danger.
Contrast with my first full playthrough of The Dark Descent, where I decided to just dash into the Wine Cellar because I figured the monster I saw wandering past the door must be another illusion this early in the game EXCEPT IT WASN'T.
The most evil thing: In the Demo of TDD, it is actually an illusion.
25:02 i could be reaching but that also reminds me of the story of how Tenochtitlan was founded- by spotting an eagle holding a snake sitting on top of a cactus in the middle of a lake
That's what I actually thought, just random Aztec-related words or something
Specifically it ties to Huitzilopochtli the Aztec god of war and the sun who was the principle god the Aztec dedicated their sacrifices to.
In legend the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan was founded when Huitzilopochtli cut the heart out of his nephew Copil and threw it into lake Texcoco to protect the Aztecs.
He then told the Aztecs to build a new city where he threw the heart which would be marked by an Eagle perched on a cactus and eating a feathered serpent or "Precious serpent" as it's also called. Which is on the flag of Mexico.
Huitzilopochtli cut the heart out of an enemy to protect his people, and in turn they made a new society where they mirror his actions to stave off the darkness.
Mandus likewise was ready to sacrifice others to stave off the doom of the future.
My favorite part was when Mandis turned towards a mirror and said “I can’t believe it, I’m Amnesia; A Machine for Pigs.”
Truly, we are A Machine for Pigs
I am Piggymandias, A Machine for Pigs, hark on my oinks ye mighty, and despair
@@averageeclairenjoyer3010 The world is a machine for pigs....and still is.
October came around quick this year.
Oh damn, it's awesome to see Ross's StopKillingGames thing on the end here. Hell yeah, that's a machine for pigs I can get behind.
During your segment criticizing the lighting, I can imagine someone from the studio feeling totally vindicated because they were saying the exact same thing but they went with the "Not being able to see anything is scary" approach anyway.
That ending monologue with that music is like something straight out of “The Leftovers”, amazing
I love that you gave credit to the monologue at the end. It really is one of the best monologues in games.
The followup spoken by Mandus afterward ("The New Century Dawns") is also excellent.
Seeing the S.W.I.N.E. cutscene made me giggle of pure joy. Please Mandy, give us the review of Strategic Warfare In a Nifty Environment we all need!
This tbh, I forgot this game existed and it brought back memories
Isn't S.W.I.N.E esencialy prototype for codename Panzers ? Also, didn't that game get a HD remaster in like last year ?
@@ComissarYarrick both were made on the same engine.
also, why does codename panzers need a remaster when the game is "get the biggest panzers you can find and right-click on the objective"
@@pnutz_2 Idk, I quite liked Codename Panzers, both phase 1&2. Tho cold war is sitting in my backlog for more than 4 years at this point 😅
That last monologue can't help but evoke Garth Marenghi's horror at visiting Scotland.
was I the only one annoyed by it he just seems so up himself
A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain’t never going back… not never.
@@GM_Head My aunt lives in Scotland, she says it's quite nice
@@okmujnyhbDepends on where you are, places like Edinburgh and Glasgow are pretty equitable to any other modern European city, if on the smaller side. There are some shitty small towns but it's still just shit by the standards of a developed country.
When you get further up north, especially the Highlands, it gets more sparse population wise but it's a lovely landscape. Very green, watery country. The weather's a bastard though, rains a lot and freezing in the winter.
Overall quite happy to live here, but as we're still stuck in the UK and the current British government can't even wipe its arse without doing something awful I'm considering moving to Denmark or something, but who knows we'll see how things go.
@@Bruhx10 I was referencing the bit in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, you're supposed to say "Well, she's wrong!'
I'm glad you bright up the pig mask jumpscares, when this game came out I wanted to like it so badly that I was sorta in denial about it for awhile, but once I experienced the gmod horror map tier jumpscares that finally broke me.
I was always a bit of a Machine for Pigs apologist because I loved the acting writing and concept. But I can't help but love how you absolutely lay into it here, and you're right on all accounts. I wonder if a modder has ever tried to fix its shortcomings by de-nerfing the enemies, remaking some of the maps to be more open, and fixing the lighting and lighting mechanics.
I hope you played Rebirth, Soma, and The Bunker, they're all excellent.
Re: monsters disappearing in The Dark Descent - To this day, I think it's one of the most brilliant parts of that game's design. I remember dying twice to the same encounter, thinking "okay, I've got this", only to be unsettled when he didn't show up the third time... until a different spot.
The game understands that repetition is the enemy of tension. While its solutions aren't complex "AI director" level stuff, it's a smart, efficient game, and I love it.
Too bad about Machine for Pigs. I appreciate the ambition, but that entry will forever serve as a useful lesson in horror design missteps.
It's a very exploitable mechanic when you figure it out. Throwing Daniel at every threat to remove them from the play made the game much easier, especially areas like the Choir.
Pretty much all of enemy encounters in Amnesia DD are scripted and easily controllable. So much so, that once you've memorized the scripted events and monster behaviour during the aforementioned events, you'd have to go out of your way to be actively chased/killed by them. I've pretty much learned this while I was doing 100% achievements on Steam - trying to beat the game on Hard, so on and so forth. You can find numerous numbers of guides on the matter or strategies for speed running explaining these things - monsters in Amnesia DD are completely predictable and very easily to control, kite, or "despawn" them all together. And there's zero randomness to it either. Once again, once you've learned that, you'd have to do things "wrong" on purpose, if you want monsters to chase you around and whatnot. Monsters in Amnesia DD are extremely primitive in terms of their execution, even though devs masterfully managed to make it seem otherwise. Especially if it's a first or a blind playthrough.
@@DopecrawleR69Which is all it needs to be.
Horror as a genre isnt a replay friendly one and everything is easy with a walkthrough.
My favorite was a chase sequence and it spawned behind a door I was opening and it exploded in my face.
@@ANDELE3025 I realize that this might be simply a preferential thing, but I fully disagree. A good horror game has just as much replay value as any other non-session based game. Because yeah, it's kinda difficult to top roguelikes, arena shooters or some MMO/ARPG games in terms of sheer replayability potential. However, I replay Alien Isolation every few years, just the same as I do with, let's say, Fallout New Vegas. Now, if we're talking about "generic-Steam-indie-horror-jumpscare-galore" kind of horror game, then yeah, I'd be inclined to agree.
The point is, the better horror game's (or any game, for that matter) AI is directed or even orchestrated, the less it feels like a mindless spooky ride at the amusement park. Kinda helps with the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing, too, which is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold. Doesn't matter if it's your first playthrough or a fifth one, either.
The ending speech of the game is quite powerful, I'm not gonna lie it reminds me of blade runner, that famous “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" line.
I remember writing a walkthrough for this game. I had to brighten every screenshot through Photoshop with some radical settings otherwise 90% of them were just dark black with some suggestions of lighter black.
Mandus's VA activated core memories when I heard him but i didn't realize why until I looked it up and saw it's Tobey Longworth, who narrates a bunch of Warhammer 40k audiobooks, including the Gaunt's Ghosts series
Perfect casting.
I've never played this, but had already seen the ending and knew a rough idea of the story. That last monologue had formed my assumption of the entire game's quality, and I was really looking forward to Mandy reviewing it.
Man.
That ending monolog has stayed in my brain since my first and only time playing the game when I was 15. That was easily one of the most affecting moments in a game I had experienced... it's pure horror, without being "scary".
Pigbarter looking a bit different now.
"The DMI pigs glow in the dark, you can see them if you're riding in a coach. You just run them over."
"Glowpiggers" 😂
The pope can't even build his own factory.
MachineOS
Naming the protagonist Oswald Mandis is so on the nose. It's Ozymandias, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
The ending monologue while you're moving up the machine to shut it down is the one thing that stuck with me after this game. It's one of the few upfront sections that doesn't hide behind notes, or metaphor. It just upfront reminds you why you started this process and the damnation you condemn others to for stopping this far in. It also frames the murder of his children as potentially a mercy killing instead of a sacrifice. Saving them from seeing the horror of war, and seeing their innocence get turned into pigs, I mean guilt.
Idk, some people legitimately excuse murdering children with that excuse.
I remember the trailer for this game was amazing. Player closing the door and hiding in the room, and then screaming pig bashing on the door.
I thought to myself "oh man its dark descent but with england and scary pig monsters!" and oh boy was it not it.
For the lack of features and gameplay elements, and everything else the Chinese room got wrong, the climax with mandus going into the machine, the music, the story... Every time it makes me feel something
It's one of the few games I can think of where I would recommend the whole game if just for the last five minutes. The final speech and accompanying soundtrack was really beautifully delivered. Maybe one of my favorite monologues in fiction.
genuine movie quality, sucks that it has a shitty game part attached to it
The writers, composer, and the voice actors gave 110% and boy that can carry a lot
@@DetectiveOlivawWriters only success is to ruin a great delivery once you think about it (or by their own words, shit themselves and ejaculate over their own excretions over the streets). A evil ghost orb that merged itself into a factory that never experienced reality (or self-seethe from split personality that 100% isnt just a writers self insert commie WW1 loss rant copy) trying to argue over humanity when it itself isnt human yet does the crimes worse is retard writing.
@@googleforcedhandleExactly. The Chinese Room does not understand how to make a good or compelling game in any way. It makes me wonder why this was even a video game and not just a short film.
I was not ready for Mandalore to say "Moshi Moshi"
I was so confused for a sec. I thought i was watching manlybadasshero for a sec.
Been playing Yakuza you think?
@@heartysquidthere might be a possibility because hes got a friend who is a big fan of that game series.
Betting he was watching Ghost Stories in the ADV dub in his free time.
Made me think of Manly
You have no clue how much joy you gave me with those S.W.I.N.E. cutscenes.
It’s one of the last Hungarian games that left a cultural footprint in this country that can still be felt today.
Me and my dad have been quoting unit lines from it since 2008, and most people Ive met at my age still remember them.
I loved that game when I was a kid. For a while I thought it was some obscure, forgotten game, I'm glad it's actually remembered by many
Toby Longworth voicing both Mandus, and reading for a ton of the Horus Heresy audiobooks is the unintentional parallel that I needed today
I was there when Mandus Slew the Pigperor.
LOL "Lets just say these Hogs arent gonna find Truffles anytime soon"
Absolutely phenomenal review. Your sections reviewing sound design and music since the first reviews have been so eye opening to media for me, and has helped me appreciate games and film so much more! It's like learning to see colours that weren't there before, but maybe it's just me who used to not pay too close attention to it after all these years.
Your videos go into such detail that things I would normally miss get both explained and shown through ingame footage, which is something a lot of other reviews don't do. Maybe I'm spoiled by your coverage and work, but I super appreciate when you include segments that show off sound effects and music for more than a brief stint. Also LOVE to see when you include art from the community, the aztec artwork is PHENOMENAL!!!
I wonder if that bit about Mandas' sons and WW1 was foreshadowing/ inspiration for Amnesia the Bunker?
Possibly, no doubt Bunker was on an idea board somewhere either before or after Pig
"As for the intro itself, there's a quote about how making a beast of one's self removes the pain of being human."
(Bat Country starts playing)
"Too many Cute Boys and I'm Starting to get an erection!" - N. Mullen of *Gay Country* 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸 🦇🦇🦇🦇🦇
It's so interesting coming back to this now that Still Wakes the Deep has released. They are still using the 'spooky detector' flashlight but the world has much more interaction and there are actual chase scenes. It feels like they learned a good deal of lessons but also ignored a few others.
Well, yeah, if you look at "interactive experience" as the genre they're exploring, then they've been tuning and improving the formula. An outright movie doesn't care for your mood or preference - it goes at its own pace. An interactive experience allows you to linger in the moment: stick around the mess and listen to the banter, or walk out onto the outer deck and stare at the waves for a few minutes if you so desire, or rush ahead, if that's what's on your mind. You can experience the same story a bit differently every time, and be present in the situation much more palpably. If judged purely form the perspective of gameplay systems, because it's technically a videogame - then it's still kinda barren. Though, I don't think it's just them failing to create an engaging game. I think, they're catering to a different, less established (right now, anyway) palate. Like, Alien: Isolation has a lot of palpable atmosphere, and is more of a "game" game, but I can imagine a certain crowd that would avoid it for that very reason. But anyway, that is my long-winded way of saying "I find it apt that you said "ignored" and not "failed to learn"." Cheers.
After seeing the most recent previews and then your own analysis of A Machine for Pigs, It'll be interesting to see how far The Chinese Room's come when we *Finally* get VTMB2... If we get it this year. It's not exactly the first time Paradox has said "oh yeah guys, it'll be THIS year."
Yeah, Paradox sucks. Also hey Charlatan, big fan of your videos, thanks to you I have several games I know I can't play out of fear of never seeing the sun again XD
Wait, what? Chinese Room is now making VTMB2? Damn, I knew it was in development hell but this is too much. It's so joever.
They also have that game “Still Wakes the Deep” coming out this year. The premise is great. I don’t really know why but setting a horror game on an oil rig is very unsettling to me.
I swear I have nightmares of floating at sea and just seeing a deep sea oil rig in the distance.
@@VinylMorpheusthat game looks cool but is probably just another walking simulator
I feel only fear.
when i first played the game, i thought the final monologue said "they will eat your ass" instead of "they will eat your hearts" and was VERY confused. i think that was the final straw that got me to start playing with subtitles
That's what I heard too, for a second I thought Mandy had subtly changed it but that would have undermined his own build up to the monologue
It definitely sounds like “and they will eat. Your. ARSE!” If you’re thinking it.
London…truly horrific
Oi you goota loicense to be afred?
Especially if you're British. Or Jewsh. Or not from a certain peninsula
Look up footage of London from the 60s. It wasn’t horrific back then. I wonder what -demographically- changed.
@@JoshuaJacobs83 First they came for the pigs and I did not squeal because I am not a pig
@@jelqsensei No one helping me or my kin out. Why should I help them when I'm under attack? London is getting what it deserves. They didn't welcome in the Trojan Horse. They welcomed the Trojans and claimed the gift would come later.
Best part about this game was the merchandise, I still use my Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs™ Fleshlight daily!!
2:27
Oswald Mandas? Man coming back to this game as an adult and having actually read stuff is certainly a fucking trip.
The disinterested "Moshi moshi" at 3:15 really got me
8:11 Mandalore appreciation moment for including a Jacob's Ladder scene.
Thank you so much for this comment. That clip intrigued me so much and I never would have known what it was without this. Watched the film last night and it was an absolute masterpiece.
@@RamHornBeast I'm really happy you could find such an awesome film thanks to my comment (and mandalore of course). Thanks for letting me know too.
the deadly premonition whistle music never fails to put a smile on my face.
Tu tu tu tururu
About the Shadow not appearing, the devs at The Chinese Room felt like the shadow was a bad part of TDD experience. Quote:
"The Shadow isn't in the game definitely. To be honest with you, it was always my least favourite thing in TDD - human evil is scary, supernatural pan-dimensional beasties just... less. I really wanted the Shadow to just be a product of Daniel's imagination, it felt like a bit of a cop-out that it was real. There's an amazing short story called The Lonesome Place by August Derleth - if you ever get a chance to read it, you'll understand what I mean... So I didn't want any actual creatures that were not a product of the world and Mandus' brain in the game"
However, The Shadow is not a part of Daniel's imagination as it is a real entity, later showed again in Rebirth and The Bunker.
I've been arguing with people on the amnesia subreddit about how shit machine for pigs is, this could be good fuel if they respond back
@@LexiconDeCrypter Odd way to spend your time
@@user-zp4ge3yp2o hey whatever
One step closer to mandy covering soma, cant wait to see that
I'm disappointed you didn't mention the OTHER god-tier ending monolog, the one at the very end, after Mandus sacrifices himself.
"I lay there, and watched the God I had created die. At the end, when we were cold as the stone we had hewn his body from, when the lights were nearly all extinguished, we heard, in the silent distance, the man-pigs singing to one another.
Then, as the last lights were gone, and we lay together in the deep, they drifted away, and all was silent. Such a silence I have never known.
And as the dust settled on my open eyes, and we lay together embraced forever, I heard, miles above us, the sounds of the city turning over in its sleep. A church bell ringing out.
And in that moment, the new century was born."
That is very cool.
My hope is thats because he knows it, just like the prior monologue, is merely pretentious, pointless and carried again by the music.
In reality, its likely so that he doesnt spoil it for people that get immersed by the music and delivery enough to not think about what is actually happening in narrative during the speech.
@@ANDELE3025 Boooooo you stink
@@ANDELE3025 why do you feel the need to reply to every other comment praising the writing just to go "actually its bad and pretentious"
@@mutantfreak48 Hes a nut idk.
The tone shift from that awesome monologue to deadly premonition whistle theme is great thank you gamer
When the trailers for this game dropped, my friend and I comforted ourselves by speculating wholesome things the "machine for pigs" would do. Like maybe it's a machine that fits pigs with little wigs and tophats. We're very unpopular people.
No it's about an ex-meat factory owner Mandus who turned into circus performer and trains pigs to drive a comically sized automobiles.
I'll have to re-watch the first 6 minutes. From the start all I could do was try to recall where I heard the intro music, and after six minutes it finally hit me. Thank you Mandy! I've been looking forward to watching this review from you!
I'm wondering the same thing! It's from a Final Fantasy game, right?
@@SamsButterscotch It's Beware the Forest Mushrooms, but I also saw Mandy lists the songs used at the end of the video, which I forgot about earlier. So many creators don't list the songs used, it's great that he does.
@@AndyCandyZeroSugar Damn I was actually looking for the song credits and couldn't find them! Thanks for the catch!
oh im so glad you agree on the monologue xD damn I was worried you wouldnt bring it up, but yeah THAT bit, makes this game, holyhell it gives me chills every time.
The Engineer's end dialog and the music was absolutely astonishing.
Music, 100% solid, dialogue, entirely pointless and in context even worse.
@@ANDELE3025can you explain a little bit? I’ve seen a few people say this but not explain why it’s so bad?
@@joshuaspaulding2978 Engineer is either a copy/different version of the Amnesia Orbs (so leftover/portal connection/power link of a eldritch whatever kaiju; essentially plot coupon) or a split part of Ozzy Mandys soul/spirit (or whatever other interpretation of eldritch orb induced schizophrenia essentially).
Which means no matter which way, the POV of the speech is either a fake prophetic spirit spouting nonsense (as it in the very game and equivalents were explicitly wrong prior) that never experienced anything of the world beyond aztec jungles or just the protagonists evil size ramblings thinking the world will end after killing his sons in a bout of madness.
The dialogue only makes any sense if you apply it from a generous modern day perspective/the writer speaking to the players instead of characters in narrative because its either from a source which isnt prophetic or is the delusions of a criminal that killed his kids and did horrible experiments on the poor and downtrodden that the church was supposed to help.
Also the same writers wrote about people getting off in the streets while shitting themselves and how if only the evils of religion, capitalism and culture were destroyed the world could be better (while in irony using Trotsky and post first revolution communist failure quotes as if they were good messages) so for anyone not just doing a basic glance over its expected.
@@ANDELE3025 The machine is explicitly given sentience by the broken half of Mandus' soul (which was absorbed by the orb, used to create the machine) and Mandus supplying it with his blood. None of its predictions are untrue; they are all direct references to events that took place in the real-world 20th century.
If you think the game is just "capitalism bad" then you weren't paying attention. Hell, Mandy even specifically points out that Mandus effectively hates everyone and everything, the machine wants to destroy the entire *planet* by "cracking the egg" at the core, and any excuses about the how's and why's of what he's doing are just that - excuses. Keep in mind, the machine largely only references totalitarian Communist states in its ranting at the end, so the game condemns both capitalism *and* totalitarian communism.
Mandus was in a bad place after his wife's death, encountering the orb convinced him to do something to make things a whole lot worse, and it left him in a sort of fugue state where the "evil half" of his soul was taking over and guiding him. It was only after he relinquished that half of his soul to awaken the machine (and, apparently, after a good wank in front of the mirror) that the "good" half of him woke up and realized he had to stop it. Mandy also covers this in the video.
@@dc8836 The orb gave him visions of his kids dying in WW1, which couldnt happen if he sacrificed them to the orb which was the prerequisite for its visions as was the success of the factory to effectively end humanity, so no, all of its visions were explicitly wrong. Also no, it cries "no true communism", not that communism is bad, because it very much does promote commie nonsense both through actually shitty dialogue AND ITS OPENING AND END CREDITS.
You are free to read secondary causes into the story, but those are products of your fiction and not facts of the narrative (which is either Ozzys eldritch induced schizo or a copy of the og amensia localized eldritch kaiju orb that didnt even have the benefit of ever seeing anything of the world outside of a single aztec temple and both have no context for the stair monologue) per which the writing itself is nonsense that relies on the idea of the player only thinking of it as meta narrative to them instead of through the in universe content, which is a fundamental writing failure.
I almost wanted to say "the one minute speech is worth the four hours drag", but the speech is better if the pig metaphor in it is the first one you hear instead of the gazillionth.
[edit] Oh God those guys are in charge for Bloodlines 2
There is a reason most fans of VTMB have basically given up and called the game dead on arrival. Like the only thing going for them is that the previous developers did some shitty stuff and were clearly going over budget.
These guys aren't in charge of Bloodlines. Mostly because by my understanding the studio has had a near complete turnover. The new devs mostly do mobile games. So it is a different set of issues.
@@squirrel_killer- Since when? Cause from what I remember, old devs went over budget, then Paradox gave it to The Chinese Room.
@@Guymanbot97 Founder of TCR fired everyone in 2017 or so, then Sumo Digital acquired them the year after, they started bringing on more people and the founder left soon after. No one who had a hand in Machine for Pigs is at that studio anymore. TCR is still working on VTMB2.
As a mexican, “some weird eldritch thing found in Mexico” is my favorite genere
Go home 😠
As a Brazilian, i really wish they would give the rest of South America a chance to be the jungle where the cosmic horror is sleeping.
@@OrroHelhammer im home actually
@@jmarinotripp240 good stay in Mexico.
@@OrroHelhammer regard.
I love coming back to this video just to listen to the food analogy. The way it comes together is just beautiful.
Great video as always, and that Aztec themed art is amazing. Huge props turbot_rex
that final monologue, man. "a child's shadow burned into the brickwork" chinese room might be terrible at gameplay, but my GOD this is one of the rawest lines i've ever heard in any videogame.
It's especially genius to have the machine predicting the future from a historical setting since we all know what all atrocities actually took place in the century to follow. It really elevates it above a typical "humans are evil and do bad things!" doomposting monologue that villains sometimes give.
i think that's a reference to the nuclear bombings of japan, where shadows of people were burned into the ground
@@ALE199-ita no shit
That Onlive reference was a deep cut. And the pig tank cutscene is vaguely reminiscent somehow too.
I remember it from being a kid, but I can't remember what it's called
The game is called S.W.I.N.E.
i LOVE how Ross Scott's fight is just ORGANICALLY being picked up by people everywhere. we just need to add the message in every single last video until we're either won or lost this fight
Hell yeah. I'm glad to see Mandy has jumped on the 😊
Sadly, Ross Scott committed the most heinous of crimes: He directly threatened the gov't monopoly on a thing (in this case power over the market, but it really doesn't matter what, just that it happened), and will therefore remain in prison likely until his final days. My heart goes out to his Mother and all who hold him dear.
Are you drunk?@@ZacHawkins42
Oh, my bad: I hadn't had my coffee yet and thought this was regarding Ross Ulbricht for some reason. *There's* a Ross who's fight needs support.
@@ZacHawkins42 TF do you mean? He literally asked THEM to actually wield it in order to get rid of gaming's legislative grey area.
The guys that made this game just released a new short horror game set on a Scottish oil rig and focused around UK labor policy and Lovecraftian eldritch horrors beyond man’s comprehension and it is shockingly good actually
Uk labor policy.. Lovecraftian eldritch horror.. aren't they one and the same?
I had to pause the video for a sec and got a surprise mirror when the frame I stopped on was pitch black. Really, I appreciate the jump scares of this review.
God i love ur videos bc generally i listen to them as i work and when 20:58 you mentioned the mexican temple i went “OH NO MARATHON” and opened up my phone to see Pathways into darkness
6:58 caught me so unprepared i spilled my coffee all over my desk
Fr
15:00 What's funny is I distinctly remember an indie horror game that came out around 2011-2013 era called like "blackwater hospital" or something which has a sequence where you go to the next chapter after escaping the monster by running into the 'forbidden basement'. The next area starts with the monster pounding on the door you just came through and if you wait like a solid 1-2 minutes it bashes through the door and comes after you even though if you proceeded normally you'd already be onto the next monster.
Funny how independent developers flying by the seat of their pants entirely fueled by inspiration alone can create so much more than an organized well oiled machine of pi- I mean humans
ua-cam.com/video/nz2KB_1SRZo/v-deo.html
Exactly 10 years ago and my own memory surprises me
Even after all these years, I know what you're talking about. That one used a necromorph model as one of the monsters, right?
What a great review, Mando. Thanks for the hard work!
This review brings back to my mind why A Machine for Pigs has never been a lasting thing in the Amnesia community.
One of my favourite plot moments in this game is where in those notes Mandus talks about the "product" (apparently pigs, right?) processing on his factory in great details. And then it turns out that all this time he talked about humans, and the fact that all those processing details were not ablut pigs is almost impossible to pick up from those notes early on due to how they're written.
YES I’m so glad you uploaded this, I’ve been looking forward to your insight on the series’s downward curve ever since you uploaded the Penumbra video.
The Aztec art is pretty great, good job - artist!
Use of the Ghost Master soundtrack is *chef's kiss*
I don't usually like horror games, since by their nature they're filled with jumpscares. The kind of horror I like is existential. Which is why this is one of my favorite horror games, right behind Soma. The fact that the same studio made two games with two of the most terrifying ends to a video game is honestly incredible.
There's a term for World War One, the Seminole Tragedy. A tragedy so horrible, that we can never go back to how the world used to be. If you could see that coming, and you had the means to end humanity instead of allowing such suffering, would you honestly allow it to happen?