Extreme Chair Stacking Adventure is a game that instantly lets you know it’s not fucking about. You wake up in a caged bed, fog permeates outside, earthquakes shake and rattle your house all setting you up for what’s going to be an intense experience placing chairs on top of furniture.
Wait, that’s not what this game is about?
Well maybe it should have been, it would have been more fun.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is the sequel to the hit horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I guess The Chinese Room, who headed this title instead of Frictional, missed the memo on “sequel to a horror game.” After the first few opening moments of this title it promptly forgets any atmospheric setup and ultimately leaves it up to the player to decide just how long they’re going to be afraid of the game – which for me wasn’t long. After completing my third or fourth area, moving on, and realizing the “scares” were going to be relegated to seeing creatures skitter through the shadows with nothing really happening my fear factor was dialed down to -11.
That’s not to say the game is devoid of enemies. You’ll engage in a handful of underwhelming encounters. Literally a handful, about five, maybe six, and for the three or so hours of gameplay that’s almost two encounters an hour. When you finally do run into any kind of enemy presence they’re about as haunting as a Saturday morning cartoon character. They are basically man-pigs, in fact billed as manpigs, with their snuffling noises and chubby little arms and low damage you’d sooner want to pet the things than run away from them. In fact running away from the is a near in-necessity, as I found charging right for one of the beasts would cause a bit of a clipping issue where the monster would run right through me with no damage taken… A lot like a chicken race if both cars were intangible.
Every day I’m snufflin’
In fact it felt like encounters and puzzles were sloppily thrown into this title because they needed to call it a game, when all they wanted to do was take me on a ride through their wholly predictable story littered with purple prose and metaphor abuse. I’ve gone over this concept before, on why a game feels like it has to be a game, and without making too many comparisons I have played some strong games just this year that used mechanics to aid and ultimately benefit their story. This title? Frankly there’s no reason it couldn’t have been a short in a national story writing contest. The mechanics added absolutely nothing to the story, and the story didn’t care at all for gameplay. At one point it felt like I was solving a half-assed and ill thought out puzzle just because the game wanted me to solve it to progress, not because there was any real rhyme or reason for it.
The game is also impossibly linear, because how else would I stay on track for their story otherwise? Not aided at all by their boring environments, save for one church location early one with some disturbing if slightly on the nail imagery, and a sewer area later on where the walls were textured with excrement (get it? Because excrement is a metaphor) the game’s locations for the most part were the same old metal pipes and wood planks – area after area after area. This served as a major detriment, as I neared their major “set piece” and Oswald Mandus was taken in awe of it I simply yawned. There was nothing impressive about the art direction whatsoever.
One of the game’s scant few genuinely cool moments.
For a game though that throws so much out the window for the sake of a “narrative” experience it sure isn’t an engaging one. It’s a premise that’s been done many, many times before, themes that have been explored in a far more effective manner (by games released earlier this year even), and a plot that’s predictable by a mile from start to finish. The protagonist, Mandus, is a bore in his execution from his motivations right down to his voice actor and the “twists” surrounding his character played up on tried, true and tired horror cliches. Maybe I haven’t driven home my point: The story is boring. Made worse by the fact it’s littered by flowery dialogue that bogs the entire experience down in pure pretentiousness, yes a little poetry in horror games or period pieces will flavor the narrative, but when it happens -all- the time the impact is not only lost, the narrative suffers.
It’s difficult to recommend this game even remotely, stripped game design, very little in interesting set pieces and a narrative that falls flat. However I did find one redeeming aspect: Chair physics.
And he did stack the constructs of lumber and cloth far above the loam and pointed towards heaven. Filling the tables of man with more of that which is made by man in mockery of the words of Newton, climbing ever higher as if to remake Babel itself from the porous seats. This furniture, it would mock God himself. And Pigs. It would also mock Pigs.
