Games News: The horror of sequels – the Chinese Room on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

One of the most unsettling things about Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is the strange grinding soundrack.

Horror game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has had some PR trouble. It's the sort of trouble that often hits the sequel to a beloved title, in this case Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent. That game was popular for its jump-scare qualities, its ability to frighten in small intense doses, to elicit squeals from players and the makers of online Let's Play videos. So when Frictional asked Brighton-based developer the Chinese Room to come onboard to make the sequel to the original, the team knew they had to make something different – and yet somehow similar to its predecessor. It was an interesting problem.

And the Chinese Room is an interesting studio. Founded by Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry in 2010, it is famous for its experimental first-person exploration game Dear Esther, a critically polarising adventure that detractors famously wanted to label 'not a game'. Though it was meant to be an experiment in fragmentary, restrained philosophical storytelling through beautiful environments, some self-proclaimed gamers saw it as a direct attack on the first-person shooter genre, unworthy of existence alongside the unchallenged might of their favourite action games. And yet Pinchbeck, the lead designer and writer of the game, was at that time doing his doctorate on first-person shooters primarily because he adores the genre.

Divide and rule

Released earlier this year on PC and Mac, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has been no less divisive, especially among fans of the original Amnesia title – particularly because the sequel departs from the idea of jump scares and shock, and goes for a nihilistic, languishing, pervasive horror, the sort that stains your memory and has you lie awake at night, long after the game has been turned off. It's really a matter of how the developers interpreted the genre.

"We wanted to make a horror game," Pinchbeck explains. "There was a distinction in our mind between making a horror game and making a game with jump scares in it. They're not the same. And we really shared that in the early conversations with Frictional as well - they were really anti-jump scares. That's not horror - that's just jump scares. So making a game that would get under people's skin in quite a deep level … What's interesting is a game that scares you while you are playing it, and what's really interesting is a game that scares you after you've finished playing it."

This new kind of horror hasn't leant itself to the YouTubers who flourished on the drama of publishing video of The Dark Descent's jump scares. "And that's what's really interesting about all the emails I've been getting," says co-director Curry, responsible for the unsettling soundtrack. "[There were emails from people saying] 'I've finished it and found it wasn't like the original Amnesia, I felt quite ambivalent about it, quite hostile about it,' and they've written back about three, four, five days later and gone, 'Oh god, that still really … That still really got under my skin.' And that's really interesting to me to have people write twice. Either, 'I loved it,' or 'it's shit', in your emails, in your in tray, but to have so many people come back and say: 'Oh, it's got a really … insidious crawl to it.'"

The developers' deep intelligence about how stories can manipulate the mind shows very much in their work. A Machine for Pigs provides a lasting imprint on players that somehow is more psychologically manipulative. This is not surprising to me as Curry and Pinchbeck seem sharply intellectual, and interested in the latent power of narrative to create loathing, fear, dread. The nuances of the soundtrack were carefully thought out to unsettle the player, to toy with their nerves.

"Sam Justice did an amazing job with the sound design," Curry says. "With music as well – I really wanted to make the sound of the machine, and that kind of feeling – that grating sound … Uneasy, and just kind of gets under your skin. I love the Klute soundtrack, which I haven't watched in ages and really made an impression on me. It has these weird sounds that you can't quite place, this weird grinding."

"It's also got to be beautiful, really really beautiful," Pinchbeck elaborates. "You've got this point where you're going through and it's shredding your nerves, and then suddenly it erupts … and you know you've got nowhere to go if you've taken the player up and up and up … you just drop it and make something that's absolutely still and sad and beautiful. So the player is left going 'I don't know where emotionally to go, I've got this big bag of tension, I've got this hateful horrible environment, and suddenly, I'm feeling sympathy. What the fuck do I do with sympathy at this point?' And that's kind of an emotionally unsettling thing."

Genre constraints

But expectation really changed the way that people viewed and played A Machine for Pigs. Of course people were eager to embrace the brand 'Amnesia' that is imprinted on the Chinese Room's game, which marketers often think is an asset, but the comparison can often be damaging for people who are interested in making original work. They wrestled with the genre constraints, the interpretation that people had of the last game, and defining their own idea of horror.

According to Curry, "So many people said, if you had taken one word out - Amnesia - you'd have been getting nines and 10s from reviews. And basically every review starts off: 'it's not as scary as the original'. It wasn't trying to beat the scariest story ever told. It wasn't what Frictional were interested in us doing."

"I think it's really interesting who the camps are that it's polarised," Pinchbeck muses. "I think it's becoming increasingly clearly delineated what those two camps are. People that might think that Amnesia's about Let's Plays and jump scares absolutely hate it; people who think that it's about the kind of art that Frictional started with Penumbra and followed through to Amnesia love it. If there's a choice between those two camps, I'm happy to sit with the game fans as opposed to the Let's Play fans. Because if we had wanted to make something that's incredibly Let's Play friendly, then we wouldn't have made the game that we made, because we would have made fairly bland corridors, and a shit ton of jump scares."

"Just before the game went live," Dan continues, "We got an email from Thomas Grip [of Frictional Games]. 'What you've got to remember, if you get flak, is that you are being compared to a game that never existed. And there were these problems and these problems and we were proud of this … But you will get prepared to the memory of a game that's three years old. And that's impossible. You will never measure up to that. If things don't go brilliantly, just remember that.' Which is a really nice email to send. We've been watching the Frictional forums, with people going 'It should have done this like Dark Descent did it', and then people write back and then go, 'Dark Descent didn't do that. And actually there is stuff in there going 'and it was just this and it was just this' …There almost were two Dark Descents."

I say I was terrified of the Dark Descent. I played 10 minutes of it and then shut myself in an in-game cupboard. I made friends with a broom for a while before quitting.

Curry laughs. "It was a great game," she nods, giggling.

Upwards trajectory

"The problem we had with the Dark Descent is that you couldn't do the things that Dark Descent did," Pinchbeck says. "Like hiding in a cupboard is amazing, you couldn't hide in a cupboard in A Machine for Pigs … So you're in this really awful situation where you have to make the same game again, but if we made the same game again, it'd just be a disaster. So you're trying to reconcile that contradiction, you're trying to make it the same game, without it being the same game. In the end we talked about it quite a lot, especially with Thomas and Jens [Nilsson, of Frictional Games], and went 'what's the spirit of the original game, what's the trajectory of the original game? Let's do that, let's not do a mechanical recreation.'"

Pacing was a definite consideration for the Chinese Room: they made a visually enthralling environment that was disturbing in the details, was quite enchanting in its creepy grandeur. In order to get the feeling right, they wanted the player to take their time getting lost in the environment.

"With [The Dark Descent], so many people said they didn't finish it," Curry says. "And since we tell stories, that's a real problem for us. If we'd told it like the original, nobody would have ever found out what the denouement was. It's true of every game, but the ending to Pigs is so … The pivotal moment of the story. It's really interesting that people who haven't got to the end don't really get it."

"The whole point of the second half of the game is that it takes everything you've learned in the first half and dissects it one piece at a time," Pinchbeck says, "and said everything you know is wrong.I think that's what makes it uncomfortable for people. Hopefully, the way it was designed, you end the game feeling really, really ambivalent. Any thread that you pull out leads to a really unpleasant place."

"The first few levels are really, really slow," Pinchbeck goes on to say. "You sometimes have to get in a mindset of certain experiences. The first half an hour of the game is critical – it's not only teaching you the mechanical way of playing the game, it's teaching you the emotional way of playing the game. If you get it wrong, it can be a disaster, it can take the sort of Assassin's Creed/Fable route – it's just nothing, it's terrible, it's a two-hour learning curve. So we knew Pigs was going to be slow … Tracking the forums there's been a direct correlation between how much people enjoyed the game and how long they took. Anyone who played the game for four hours hated it, and anyone who played over six hours loved it. And that's just about the speed they spent in there, being in this place. We said this in the splash screen: don't play this game to beat it, play it like a game to be in the world for. If you play this like a really old-fashioned role-play game, then you get a lot more out of it."

A league of its own

Our conversation brought into relief that genre can be agonising for creators. Amnesia: The Dark Descent created a genre for itself that had forum-goers begin to dictate constraints for the Chinese Room's interpretation. But it had happened before to the Chinese Room: their previous game, Dear Esther, was constantly dogged by internet conversation about whether it was a game or not, what made it a game, what made it not a game, ad nauseum, seemingly ignoring their actual personal response to the mechanics of it, more interested in classifying it than they were playing it.

"We were talking about the Sopranos this morning," Pinchbeck says of himself and his daughter. "Is Sopranos … Is it a black comedy, or is it a thriller? And if you call it a thriller, does that detract from it being what it is? If you look at say, Ace Ventura Pet Detective, and say you're only going to look at it according to a very strict set of rules, let's say action thriller – well, it's a rubbish action thriller. If you take Goodfellas and say: 'I'm only going to examine this as if it's a Jim Carrey slapstick comedy', it's going to fail miserably.

"But if you're the type of person who can only judge something on a pre-existing rigid set of criteria, you've got a big problem anyway. The only question that actually matters is, is it good? There are still people who write about Dear Esther and say: 'I wish I could love it, but it's not a game.' Well you think: 'Well you're just a fucking idiot then, aren't you?' because actually if you have to call it a name before you decide whether you like it or not, you've got a weird kind of hangup."

Curry took it even further, explaining that she was taken aback by the vehemence of the response to experimentation of the form. "What I'm really surprised by is that people see [Dear Esther] as an attack on games."

"We've destroyed the games industry according to Total Biscuit," Dan Pinchbeck says. "With the greatest amount of pride in [Dear Esther] – it ain't that significant."

Before I visited the Chinese Room's studios, which were disappointingly brightly lit, not at all gloomy or scary, with nothing to denote Asian influences, I asked the internet what they would like to know about Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. One respondent asked, "Why pigs?" And Jim Stirling of Destructoid asked, "How pigs?" I put these important questions to Curry and Pinchbeck, who laugh.

"Well, A Machine For Sheep wouldn't really work," Pinchbeck says.

"A Machine For Cows sounds really unfrightening," Curry says.

After a while, Pinchbeck says of pigs, "Well... it's a smart animal that we kill. In vast numbers. And that's really nice as a metaphor."

* Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is out now on Windows, OSX and Linux via Steam.

Dear Esther is still out in the wild, destroying the games industry, as far as we know.

Source: Theguardian. comReadmore: Games News: The horror of sequels – the Chinese Room on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs