Headscratchers / Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

• Same as last time, why doesn't Mandus carry a weapon with him?
  • He doesn't have any ammo by the looks of it. And even if he did, he would probably just attract every manpig within a mile radius by firing one.
    • What about some sort of club?
    • That wouldn't do much good. The manpigs are stronger and more durable than Mandus could ever hope to be. A melee weapon would do nothing but instill false confidence. In any case, based on the description on the effects of the Compound X, it seems that the pigs are can't be killed by normal means. They stay animated until they literally fall apart. You couldn't stop one even with a close range shotgun shot before it tears you apart.
    • I remember something to the tune of electrocuting one to death. (Shining a light on something that causes electricity....somehow....)
    • That was Compound X which apparently reacts negitively to light sources. It's Vitae from the first game.
• Why was that first pig man in Mandus' house?
  • The house is directly connected to the Machine. The manpigs appear to play a part in maintaining the Machine.
• What was the ultimate purpose of the machine? To kill everyone? A supercomputer? To make the pig men? Or was it just a large slaughterhouse for humans?
  • The true purpose depends on whether you're asking pre-amnesia Mandus or the Engineer. Mandus intended to make the Machine a new God through massive human sacrifice to guide the humanity to a new beginning. The Engineer doesn't see anything worth saving about the humanity and is just intending to kill everybody in the world to end all suffering once and for all.
  • It's essentially a massive sacrificial altar, utilizing industrial technology to slaughter as many people as possible in offering to Mandus' new "god". There's a reason that the final area is shaped like a Meso-American temple.
    • The sacrificial/torture elements of the machine are there to generate Brennenburg Vitae, which could be made into compound X. Compound X was used to make the manpigs and appeared to be be necessary for the machine to function. Mandus initially built the machine to stop the horrors of the 20th century at the cost of sacrificing marginalized societal groups.(imigrant laborers, orphans, ect) The Engineer distorted that to the point that it had written off all of humanity.
• Why does Mandus have amnesia?
  • Maybe killing his own children caused a trauma to block the memories? Or the machine simply erased those memories to trick him as to make him think his kids were in danger and thus, in trying to save them, he would start the machine again.
  • It's an easy detail to miss, but the note that you find among the pig masks after you reactivate the Machine suggests that Mandus attempted suicide by electrocution after his first sabotage, but rather than killing him, it ended up temporarily wiping parts of his memory, instead.
  • It could also be that creating the Engineer made him eventually lose his memory.
  • Alternatively, it could be because of his drinking. Have you seen how many empty bottles there are around the mansion?
• Couldn't Mandus avoid doing all of crazy things he did? I mean he's a wealthy industrialist. Couldn't he use his wealth to move from London in some other country?
  • What would moving away accomplish? Mandus was, by definition, driven crazy by the visions of the horrible future. He didn't want to just avoid the horrors, but prevent them altogether by means that only made sense to him.
  • Emigrating to Switzerland wouldn't prevent the large-scale atrocities, but he could have easily saved his children and prevented his own personal tragedy. Even if he didn't know which countries would stay neutral, why escalate straight to murder when a minor disability (cutting off a few toes, say) would keep them out of the war just as well?
    • The key point being that it wouldn't prevent the large-scale atrocities, and he was also driven pretty insane by the visions. If the man's conclusion after seeing those was "build giant death machine to Mercy Kill the world" he was probably not in a good state of mind.
• In the penultimate level, whose heart was that wired up to the machine (ie. that takes you to the Temple)? And on that note - who was the chap inside the chamber at the start of the Temple level (I must have overlooked something obvious)?
  • The heart belongs to his children.
  • I...don't think so? I thought the notes only ever said Mandus took their skulls back with him (...wow that was a dark sentence to type)?
  • Mandus found an Orb in the temple in Mexico, which broke in two, splitting his soul and giving him a vision of the future. The hearts you see at the end are Mandus' interpretation of the two halves of the Orb with lay at the heart of the machine. This is also why, at the end when you sit in the seat, you can look to your sides and see the bodies of his sons instead. They're illusions.
• So what becomes of the Pig Men after Mandus kills the Machine? Do they die along with their creator(s), or do they simply survive and continue to pillage London?
  • According to Mandus's narration at the end, he heard the Manpigs singing to one another as the lights started to go out. Presumably they lost their drive to pillage and burn once the Machine stopped giving them orders.
• So if Mandus not only tampered with an Orb, but broke it, why doesn't the Shadow appear?
  • According to the wiki, it hunts those unable to take full control of the orbs. Mandus used them to create his machine, didn't he? Johann Weyer was able to harness their power without any ill effects, after all. Alternately. the Shadow bitched down from facing Mandus because it was afraid of his beardy manliness.
• Why does Mandus start teleporting randomly near the end of the game?
  • He starts teleporting around the time he enters the Electrogrativitic Suppression Towers. Given the arcane nature of what those towers do and their proximity to the Orgone disperal tanks that give the Tesla creatures their ability to teleport, it's possible that space-time is just really messed up there.
  • Quite possibly he's not. Mandus isn't exactly in the most stable frame of mind when he tackles the final part of the game, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest parts of it are just elaborate hallucinations; i.e. the temple in the final level is far too large to actually exist beneath London, the visual of the machine being powered by his sons' hearts makes no sense when Mandus explicitly states that he brought only their skulls back from Mexico, and the physical form of the Engineer when he is also stated to not have one and only exist as a consciousness of the machine.
• How can London, according to Mandus' narration, "turn over in its sleep" and peacefully enter a new century, if East End was being violently pillaged and razed by Manpigs that same night?
  • I think it meant that the Manpigs stopped breaking havoc in the end. According to Mandus' ending narraton, the Manpigs began "to sing together" which could imply that at the moment the Engineer, aka the Machine was destroyed they stopped taking orders to kill and capture. By definition, this means that no more humans were sacrificed for the machine and no more Manpigs harmed people. Thus the peaceful athomsphere, and thus London "turns over in its sleep" and enters a new century.
• A crucial plot point of the game is just how god-awful the 20th century was going to be. But even taking all the wars and atrocities into consideration, it is still considered one of the more prosperous, enlightened, and peaceful eras in man's history (in comparison to the preceding centuries, if nothing else). Cures for dozens of fatal illnesses were discovered. Xenophobia and racism went from being commonplace to taboo in many parts of the world, particularly in first world nations. Advances in technology banished famine across vast regions of the planet. Life expectancy and standards of living skyrocketed. Ethics and morality were refined and advanced in many ways. Yes, there is no denying the soul-crushing horrors that took place, but why was Mundus blind to all the goodness and triumph that the 20th century would also usher in?
  • From what it sounds like, the First World War basically brainbleached him enough that he either didn't want to see the rest, or deemed it too high a price to pay.
    • He also saw visions of his sons dying in the trenches during this war.
  • Mandus got caught up in the idea of industrialized horror, and conveniently forgot that the past centuries contained just as much horror and bloodshed, just not in the same way. For example, the Mongols invasion of Asia and Europe basically depopulated half the known world. And of course, we cant forget that Mandus vision gave him a first-hand view of all the 20th century horror, while everything before would just stand out as cold facts in a textbook.
  • Welcome to the Humanity Is Flawed trope. Countless works have debated whether one outweighs the other, and that's arguably the entire point of the game's story as well. Pre-amnesia Mandus clearly went with the answer that the good wasn't worth the bad, while the story seems to side with the alternative given it expects you to keep trying to shut the machine off, as opposed to give the nearest manpig a hug and let them have their way with London and eventually the planet as a whole.
• How did Mandus go from "the future is really going to suck" to "I must kill thousands of people!"? Like, how did he have any idea if that would even work?
  • The same way he saw the future, presumably.
• Why did the pigmen attack Mandus at first? He's technically their boss. And even if the Engineer is the one really controlling them, surely he wouldn't want them to get in the way while Mandus repairs the machine for him.