Amnesia Machine For Pigs Monster
Is for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Please look over our and before posting. If you're looking for 'lighter' gaming-related entertainment, try!The goal of is to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Now, I'm gonna do my best with this one, but the story is pretty difficult to follow. This won't be so much a critical analysis as much as just trying to fit the pieces together. Feel free to correct or adjust my theories if you found or remember notes that I didn't - it's very difficult to cite my sources because I've only played through the game once.
And, needless to say, if you haven't played it and don't want spoilers, don't continue.So, here's the timeline as I've figured:Lillibeth, Oswald Mandus' wife, dies giving birth to twins, Edwin and Enoch. This is the first time Mandus' personality begins to split - in this case, he loves his sons, but resents them for the death of Lillibeth. (Side note: Enoch is a character in The Bible who God spares the pain of living by whisking him away to Heaven. Edwin may also be a reference, but to what I don't know.)I THINK that at this point, Mandus already owns a processing company for the distribution of meat.
It seems as though he was already a man of some wealth before his trip to Mexico (a note later on references him having a silver spoon in his mouth), and the Machine is largely modifications to existing buildings. This is only an assumption, however. It's also apparent that he was already a weird, weird guy. He writes about watching Lillibeth in the bath through his one-way mirror.
This also makes it evident that he already lived in his mansion, and it was already full of secret passages.Mandus and his sons take a trip to Mexico for Mandus' financial reasons - specifically, he seems to believe the the Aztec ruins have some treasure or secret to wealth hidden in them. In an Aztec temple, his sons find an Orb akin to the one in The Dark Descent.
It was announced that in A Machine for Pigs that when you die, the monster won't go away and will appear in a different area then the last time. :) so what your saying it is partialy randomly generated? That makes this game even more playworthy. I hope the monster are in different locations when you go through another play through. A Machine for Pigs. Fit only for the slaughtering of Pigs. From the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Dear Esther comes a new first-person horrorgame that will drag you to. Many people have raved about how badly Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs was set up, and now there's a new horror game to tickle your taste buds or wear out your vocal cords. This game would be called Damned.You can expect some bugs in the early access edition, but this game will freak anyone out, and just in time for Halloween!
Mandus comes in contact with it and it seems to imprint some vision of the 1900's onto him and how to prevent it (he seems to have engineering capabilities that baffle the greatest minds he can find), as well as make him quite ill. Now, it is possible that at this point the Orb possessed him with the spirit of the Machine, which gives reason to his split personality shown late in the game - however, I suspect it only magnified his already splitting personalities: the side of him the loved his children became his humanitarian half, where the side that hated them became a misogynistic lunatic.At any rate, due to madness or the will of the Orb, Mandus sacrifices his children in the Aztec temple.Upon returning, Mandus places the Orb on the mantelpiece and buries his children under the garden. Now Mandus is batshit crazy and, fearing the visions of the future he's seen, he begins work on a Machine that will make people loyal, clever, and quick to take direction. Things start to break down a little here; the narration seems to describe human as foul, disgusting pigs, but also describes pigs as the shining example of the features they are looking for in the experiments. Chalk it up to craziness.
During this period, he is often laid up in his sickbed as his illness affects him more and more. He also seems to believe his children are still alive - notes reference him scolding them about staying away from the machines quite a bit.(A note: I think it is possible that Mandus' initial vision for the Machine was to lure the greedy, poor, sick, weak and otherwise undesirable into the machine, where they would be processed into food to help the healthy survive. This seems to be implied by some of Mandus' acts of goodwill as described in the church.
It's possible that the change in the Machine from this purpose to one of 'evolving' humanity beyond its flaws came when Mandus acquires a specimen from Brennenburg, the location of The Dark Descent. At this point, now quite sure that man can be twisted into a more efficient machine, he redirects the Machine to that purpose. Although honestly I don't know.)Mandus' madness continues growing and affects more of his life. For instance, the cages in the bedrooms would trap party guests and pour them into the Machine. Various secret entrances were dug not just to and from his house and factories but all over London.Finally Mandus' illness gets the better of him. He spends several weeks in bed. I believe during this period, Mandus' good side regains some control and sabotages the Machine.
When Mandus awakes, he has selective Amnesia - he remembers his children, but not their end, and seems to have some vague idea of the Machine's existence, but not its purpose or its workings.The Machine, whether by the power of the Orb or just because Mandus is nuts, tells him his children are lost deep in the Machine's inner workings, and he must descend to find them. He does so, undoing his previous sabotages in his search for his children.Finally, by the Machine's deception, Mandus reactivates it completely. Pig-men, the twisted creations of the Machine, apparently spill out into the streets of London to wreak havoc, although this seems a bit dodgy to me. First, because previous to this event there was no evidence leading up to it, nor did it seem to be part of the plan to just sic Mandus' better, more efficient humans on everyone else.
He was trying to save them, right? Just turn them into pigs. And secondly, because when you are walking the streets of London you continue finding notes to and from yourself, and they seem pretty detached. I suspect this part of the game was an insanity-powered hallucination.
Amnesia A Machine For Pigs Water Monster
When Mandus realizes his children are dead by his hands, he finds some other reason to keep fighting himself. The reason he picks is to save everyone, the same reason he had to build the Machine in the first place.Mandus descends back into the Machine and destroys it properly. When he reaches the core, he tears his own heart out to end the madness once and for all. His two children seem to be hanging here as well, although I believe that is another hallucination.
They don't seem to be serving a purpose, and he supposedly buried his children upon returning from Mexico.In this room there also seem to be two halves of his Orb, which leads to some interesting ideas. The Orb in The Dark Descent was used to bridge a portal between our world. Some other one. There is also a note about the Splashy Water Ninja that claims some 'early attempts' have a hard time staying in this world and are often ripped from ours to another repeatedly. These two things seem to imply that some step in the creation of the pigmen is supernatural or arcane. There are other interesting clues, such as a note about how Mandus killed a dog and then revived it using the same process used to bring the pigs to life, and it suffered from the wound that killed it until Mandus killed it again, leading him to drowning as the best way of gathering parts for pigmen. Based on this information, I think that maybe revival of his victims was only possible through the Orb, which transmuted the souls of something from the other world into the bodies he created.
The note 'Developer's Logs' on supports this, as well as many notes speculating on the properties of a soul.EDIT: Some other notes:At the very end, the Machine mentions that the entire world is a Machine for Pigs. That hints at a bigger truth in the heart of the story: Mandus set out to stop the atrocities of the 20th century and instead created the first one. His Machine and the world are very much alike: taking the living and making dead, taking dead and making living, constantly procreating, creating, and destroying for either no purposes or one that is completely mad. It's futile, both the problem and the resolution, because when you try to sabotage the Machine you just turn it back on.There are two main personalities in this story: the protagonist and the antagonist, both a part of Mandus, represented by Mandus and the Machine. Mandus alludes to the word 'Man', making the two forces in the game Man and Machine, each personified by a different side of Mandus.My working theory for the stasis pod at the end is that it holds the Gatherer specimen brought back from Brennenburg, and it's being used as a template for the pigmen. That guy's timeline is far better informed than mine, because I'd completely forgotten that each journal has a date at the top.
Thanks for the link.He kills them to spare them the horrors of the upcoming wars.Correct, that is the 'on top' reason, as it were. However, only a crazy person would commit such an atrocity for a reason that flimsy. I only wonder whether seeing the future drove him mad, or if at this point the Orb is imposing some kind of will upon him.Again, the whole crazy idea behind the machine is to murder everyone so they don't get to witness the nightmares of the coming century.Again, yes, I do believe that to be correct. But I don't think his plan is just to brutally murder everyone - that's exactly what he's trying to avoid in the future. I think the goal is to turn everyone into pigs to 'free' them from the horrors of the future and from sentience. The pig invasion thing just seems a little too much like the scenarios that caused him to build the Machine, and by that point the player-controlled Mandus has completely lost it anyways. I believe the pigmen 'invade' to drag the populace of London back into the machine to fuel it, and create more pigmen in turn.
I believe this is also the primary objective of Oswald's/The Machine's. Before the 'invasion' they just secretly abducted and murdered people so they didn't draw attention before they were ready.Also, I thought that maybe the body in the machine core was Oswald's, and the game was more of a battle of wills between Oswald and Bad-Oswald, everything being a hallucination/metaphor while this Machine basically battles itself internally. I believe this is supported by a journal where Oswald describes wires entering his mouth or ears or something?Also, this would support some of the weird room-layout-changing that happens in Holding Pens, Low Temperature Storage, and near the end of the game (while you're being stalked by the Tesla pigman).
I watched a playthrough and my impression was that the purpose of creating the pig people was to create an army of killing machines that would wipe out the population to prevent them from seeing the horrors that would happen in the 20th century. There were references in the notes that seemed to allude to the holocaust and World War I that I recall, and the voice reasons that it is saving these people just as the main character had 'saved' his children from these horrors by killing them.There was also a bunch of shit I didn't get, like one of the notes references the creatures moving between dimensions or something like that and the final weird electric pig appears and disappears in front of your eyes several times. Also why all the pig masks appearing and disappearing, why are the water enemies just electric charges? Also why the talk of bringing back the dead, I thought it was going in the way that he was trying to bring his children or his wife back from the dead, but then that turned out not to be part of the story at all. What was the thing he found in Mexico that drove him crazy and where is it now? Was the voice speaking to him his own insane inner monologue or was there some other entity, he speaks about a brilliant engineer who helped him build the machine in the recordings. Also I thought the title was going to be a little more of a metaphor, but the game is actually about a machine that makes pig monsters.
Was kind of disappointing when the payoff was pig people. There was also a bunch of shit I didn't get, like one of the notes references the creatures moving between dimensions or something like that and the final weird electric pig appears and disappears in front of your eyes several times. Also why all the pig masks appearing and disappearing, why are the water enemies just electric charges?I believe that is referring to some otherworldly aspect of the pigmen.
Amnesia A Machine For Pigs Monsters
The idea seems to be that something in the 'early attempts' at revival couldn't keep the final product completely bound to this world, so they would travel back and forth rapidly between this world and whatever other one. What part of the pigmen required a supernatural experiment, I don't know.Also why the talk of bringing back the dead, I thought it was going in the way that he was trying to bring his children or his wife back from the dead, but then that turned out not to be part of the story at all.It is mentioned in a letter that he believes it's too late to bring his wife back from the dead, and he does seem to believe almost up until the game takes place that his children are still living. Instead, he is using his discovered technology to kill people and bring them back as more docile, efficient creatures, in what he believes is another step in human evolution.What was the thing he found in Mexico that drove him crazy and where is it now?It was an Orb, an ancient Lovecraft-style artifact that heavily affects the mind. I believe that we see it at the end of the game, broken in half and doing. Something to the Machine. It's the two glowing blue things in the last scene.Was the voice speaking to him his own insane inner monologue or was there some other entity, he speaks about a brilliant engineer who helped him build the machine in the recordings.Good question.
Whether the voice speaking to him was his own insanity or a second person instilled in him by the Orb I do not know. It doesn't matter much, at any rate - either way, it is physically Mandus, driven mad. As for the engineer, I'm relatively certain that that, too, is Mandus, using knowledge bestowed on him by the Orb.Also I thought the title was going to be a little more of a metaphor, but the game is actually about a machine that makes pig monsters, with some allus.At the very end, the Machine mentions that the entire world is a Machine for Pigs. That's the metaphor. It also hints at a bigger truth in the heart of the story: Mandus set out to stop the atrocities of the 20th century and instead created the first one. His Machine and the world are very much alike: taking the living and making dead, taking dead and making living, constantly procreating, creating, and destroying for either no purposes or one that is completely mad.
It's futile, both the problem and the resolution, because when you try to sabotage the Machine you just turn it back on.Hey, there's some real story analysis!. At any rate, due to madness or the will of the Orb, Mandus sacrifices his children in the Aztec temple.(from original post)This is probably pretty obvious, but the reason he sacrifices them is because The Orb showed him a vision of the future where they both die in a trench during the Battle of the Somme in WWI (the note even specifically mentions it was during the Battle of the Somme). So yeah, he went totally nuts, but at the same time there was some reasoning and logic behind it (however broken and evil). So I guess it was less like Jack Nicholson with an axe in The Shining and more 'I couldn't let them live only to grow up and be killed like pigs in a trench'. One thing - Mandus is Daniel's (A:TDD protagonist) grandson, and travelled to Mexico searching for the Orb after reading his grandfather's notes.
It is also implied that Daniel kept experimenting with the Orb after events of A:TDD.Also, I think that grand goal of the Machine was transformation of the humanity into pig-people (that’s what the Machine was for), creating a race of simpler, baser creatures that would follow their needs and instincts, and would not know war, oppression and other horrors created by mankind. It’s very Victorian.Also, it's unclear who lies in the Iron Lung near the end.
I actually found a lot of useful information in the Amnesia wiki page that I wouldn't have understood without outside help. I need to play the game again now that I know where the scares are, so I can concentrate more fully on the story.It seems as though Mandus bled himself at the Machine when he sabotaged it the first time, thus inserting his 'malevolent half' (as his soul/personality was ripped in two by the orb) into the Machine. Thus he woke up some time later with no memory of the incident.There's a lot to comb apart in the story so I suppose one should take the wiki with a grain of salt, as well. Off to play again.