The first look at the new Amnesia game is not a pleasant one.
Revealed back in February, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is the follow-up to the dreadful, harrowing Amnesia: The Dark Descent. A Machine For Pigs isn’t a direct sequel – it’s set 60 years after Dark Descent in Victorian London, with an entirely new cast of characters – nor is it being created by Frictional Games, the studio responsible for the original. Instead, Frictional is “producing” the game, while development is being handled by thechineseroom of Dear Esther fame.
In spite of that hand-off, the brief snippet of gameplay on display in this trailer looks more than a little like what we had to put up with in The Dark Descent: awful things happening off-screen, desperate cowering in a dark corner and the “woozy effect” that means you’ve had just about all of this nonsense that you can take. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s horrific, yes, but that’s what we’re here for – but what I’m really hoping for is that the new game, with a new developer, will provide a different take on the horror experience.
On the other hand, it’s just a few seconds out of what will ultimately be several hours of gameplay, and you can’t blame the developers for wanting to drive home the fact that this is an Amnesia game. And as anyone who’s played the original will attest, sometimes it’s the things you don’t see that you really need to worry about.
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs comes out this fall.
