Alexander is once again the main villain of the game, with Mandus as the pawn.
Hear me out. From what little infomation we've been given we know Madus had the machine built, that he's pretty much a bad person right? There has to be a twist somewhere in all this. Mandus came back from mexico after something bad had happened, after that there is this HUGE gap in his memory, he's only aware of the night terrors he's been having about some monsterous machine. After all there might be no magic amnesia potion this time around, so how did Madus lose his memory? He just wakes up in pig monster hell basically. Well, what if Alexander didn't leave this world after he died in the endings of the first game? It was his punishment to be sent to this dimension, so what if physically dying doesn't get him out of it and his 'energy' or 'soul' or whatever lovecraft space aliens have is still wondering around. He would be PISSED. The first game kinda made Alexander seem like Dracula, so what if the next game is going towards a more jekyll and hyde route? And Alexsander (through Madus) was like 'I was to kind last time, it's time to go all out.' This is probably not the case, but I think making Madus clearly evil right from the trailer is...well obvious.- Jossed, the Machine itself is the Big Bad.
The Machine is actually much more mundane in its nature.
Oswald clearly states that what the Machine will be fed depends on one's interpretation of what a pig is. Now let's do a game of association. Pigs—dirty, filthy, sloppy, don't care at all how they look, very, very instinctual. Now, what would a wealthy industrialist in the late 1800s (especially in Victorian England) consider to be dirty, filthy and on the very level of a base animal? Here's a little hint: it has to do with social class.- There still needs to be something supernatural to account for the humanoid pig-monsters. And based on the certain letter
◊, wouldn't it be a rather pointless exercise to just feed the poor with the poor just to have more poor people for the Machine? If that's your goal, a straightforward genocide would be faster.- In his defense, straightforward genocide might've been faster, but it would have never flown. British society by the Victorian era was already sick of the idea of perpetuating genocide against "Dirty Wogs", nevermind Britons (even if they were dirty in the lower class), and that was exactly why absolutist states like the Habsburgs, Germany, Ottoman Turkey, and Tsarist Russia were seen as enemies of humanity (even by good portions of their own people) for not adhering to that. Anybody trying to do it would probably be hauled off by bobbies or shot by Regulars long before they got far. The machine as it is is already risky as it is, but it has some sort of chance of success compared trying to establish Auschwitz in Piccadilly Square. As for social classes, they usually don't work like that. Even if Mandus is enough of a sociopath to subscribe to that view and much of Victorian British society is cl assist, that doesn't mean they'd sit idly by if they knew what was going on. Especially since the poor tended to be the ones supporting the rich by working at their factories and doing the jobs they didn't want to do.
- My point was that the Machine would be an excercise in futility if its sole purpose was to kill poor people, because it needs them to run it and its sole produce is their flesh. There needs to be something more about the Machine apart from its mundane functions to justify its existence. From the information that has leaked so far, pursuit of immortality or resurrection sounds like a potential possibility.
- Actually this has been largely subverted. Mandus and the engineer seek to turn vast swaths of humanity into "dirty, filthy and on the very level of a base animal" Manpigs, seeing this as "freeing them" from the curse of being human, while butchering (literally) the rest.
- In his defense, straightforward genocide might've been faster, but it would have never flown. British society by the Victorian era was already sick of the idea of perpetuating genocide against "Dirty Wogs", nevermind Britons (even if they were dirty in the lower class), and that was exactly why absolutist states like the Habsburgs, Germany, Ottoman Turkey, and Tsarist Russia were seen as enemies of humanity (even by good portions of their own people) for not adhering to that. Anybody trying to do it would probably be hauled off by bobbies or shot by Regulars long before they got far. The machine as it is is already risky as it is, but it has some sort of chance of success compared trying to establish Auschwitz in Piccadilly Square. As for social classes, they usually don't work like that. Even if Mandus is enough of a sociopath to subscribe to that view and much of Victorian British society is cl assist, that doesn't mean they'd sit idly by if they knew what was going on. Especially since the poor tended to be the ones supporting the rich by working at their factories and doing the jobs they didn't want to do.
The Machine was created to extract Vitae on an industrial scale, and was built by Oswald Mandus to try and contain/kill the Shadow and the Orb.
Oswald Mandus's trip to mexico and his mysterious actions afterward seem very similar to those of Daniel in the first game, I'm betting when he went to mexico he discovered a new Orb in another mysterious ruin, and became hunted by the same force. But where Daniel found refuge with Alexander, Oswald had no-one, and in desperation to survive he used the technology of his era to construct a machine to extract vitae, at first from pigs, to save himself (likely using the cover story of it being a slaughterhouse). However, this was not enough, and in desperation he turned to abducting humans from the poorer areas of London to feed the machine.- The part about it being used by Mandus to save himself from the Shadow of the Orb is Jossed, though it's entirely conceivable that the mechanism by which the machine empowered the engineer was by the industrial extraction of Vitae.
Jack the Ripper will Appear.
Same location, barely a decade later, and he fits in perfectly with the theme of the game- Turns out it really is the same location, as recent screenshots show both Bucks Row◊ and Hanbury Street◊, the sites of the two first Jack the Ripper murders.
- Jossed. He gets a mention, though.
The Machine is Mandus' attempt to get "revenge" upon humanity for his dead child.
The text in the second trailer ("This world is a machine. A machine for pigs. Fit only for the slaughtering of pigs.") and Mandus's words at the end ("That all rather depends on what one considers to be a pig.") suggest that Mandus has a deep and abiding contempt for mankind. We hear a child reciting the nursery rhyme "This Little Piggy" at the beginning of the trailer, and whispering "Daddy..." at the end, and we catch fleeting a glimpse of what could be a child walking by at one point. Mandus once had a child, whom he loved deeply, who died in some tragic fashion, likely at the hands of other people. This traumatic experience warped Mandus so much that, in his eyes, humanity is now nothing more than a vast herd of swine deserving only to be fed to his dark Machine.- Jossed Mandus had twin sons, but killed them himself after seeing them die in the trenches of the first world war. The Machine is intended as a massive sacrifical altar to purify humanity
Oswald will be related to Daniel in some way.
Because why not.- Surprisingly, there seem to be implications to that direction.
Inspiration for A Machine for Pigs came from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
Given the letter
◊ from the orphanage matron, it might not be much of a stretch. There is no monster, your character is just nuts.
So how do you top the last game's open-mouth horror? Simple. No monster at all. Just one character's guilt and shame over what he's done in creating a factory that feasts itself on human beings, hunting him relentlessly. The only reason he doesn't kill himself at the beginning of the game is that he has... amnesia. The player character is not Oswald Mandus.
The mysterious player character only thinks he's Oswald Mandus for some particular reason.- Jossed
The purpose of the Machine is to enact an Aztec sacrificial ritual automatically on an industrial scale.
Oswald Mandus started to pursuit the creation of the Machine after his expedition to Mexico. The pig mask on the game's cover seems to suggest Mesoamerican origin by its style. For whatever reason, Mandus wants to recreate an Aztec human sacrifice to pursuit some supernatural goal, but in the absence of thousands of loyal followers, he needs to mask it into an automated slaughterhouse and then use subterfuge to lure the victims in with promise of good pay and food — unknown to them, side produce of the Machine.- Confirmed! Sort of.
- Hell, the final level even takes place in a machine styled to resemble an Aztec pyramid.
The reason why Mandus has Regenerating Health
Is because of his exposure to small amounts of Compound X over time.