YMMV / Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

• Awesome Music: The Kyrie from the Halloween trailer.
  • "Mors Praematura"
  • "The Church", a solo organ piece which plays when you enter St. Dunstan's Church.
  • "Dieses Herz"
  • "Mandus", which plays during the villain's Motive Rant.
  • The Motive Rant itself is included in the track "A Child's Shadow", immediately followed by "The New Century Dawns".
  • "This New Century", which plays during the final moments of the game.
• Broken Base:
  • Some people were skeptical that The Chinese Room was developing this game, this mostly came from fans who didn't like Dear Esther. Once the game came out, changes to mechanics brought this issue up again. It seems another source of debate is whether Frictional should have given The Chinese Room as much creative room as they did in the final product, and if it makes the game better or worse.
  • There is also a group of people that are miffed about how the game doesn't feature the changes that Frictional promised. The monsters don't really act much different from the ones in the previous game, and the promise that monsters don't disappear doesn't even matter much since there are only a few in the game. Also despite promises to make the game more open, the end result is very linear compared to The Dark Descent. Again, whether or not if these changes were for the best or if they were because of The Chinese Room's influence is a heated topic.
• Contested Sequel: The general reaction to the game, because of the changes made by The Chinese Room and their involvement in it. While the story is quite good and the voice-acting is far superior to the first game, the length, lack of Inventory Management Puzzles, and, perhaps most prominently, a remarkably different style of horror that focuses more on unnerving the player by creating a dreary, oppressive atmosphere, rather drawing on the the more direct and upfront terror of being stalked and actively hunted by enemies, made this game a rather controversial sequel.
• Fan Nickname: From the teaser trailer alone, the pig monster earned the nickname of Piggeh.
• Genius Bonus: At the beginning of the game, you pick up a phone and the caller says: "Precious eagle cactus fruit...help us." This could come across as a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment to those who are not familiar with the term; it's apparently a reference to Aztec sacrificial rituals, in which the victims' hearts, cut open from their chests with flint knives, are sacrificed to a god named Huitzilopochtli. Read more here..
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: This game clocks in at about 3 1/2 hours of gameplay, which was about half of the original Amnesia. Because of this, and the removal of an inventory, many fans have felt that this game is more linear and doesn't encourage you to explore nearly as much.
• Narm:
  • Mandus's journal entries are written in an often epic, pompous style that's so forced, it comes out as unintentionally hilarious, and makes you doubt if he's really serious about saving his sons. Some of it sounds more like something you would hear from South Park than Amnesia.
    "How can a man shit so much blood and still live?"
  • On a similar note, Mandus's threat to the Machine.
    Mandus: I will rain excrement into your very soul.
  • The Engineer, post reveal, can really seem like this, with just how hammy he is sounding, more comical than threatening.
    The Engineer: MORE PIG! MORE PIG!
  • Also the fact that The Engineer's ultimate plan to take over the world with an army of manpigs sounds, on paper, like something from a Silver Age comic.
  • Given the nature of the game, whenever Mandus mentions sex in his journals, it's hilarious. When he mentions them in unnecessary and irrelevant detail, then it's just ridiculous. And since not every gamer is an English major who would know what the hell he is saying because of the old-fashioned and industrial jargon, it's easy to misinterpret them as something else entirely. Or, if you wanted to read the easier understood detail about Mandus' and Lilibeth's wedding night by her "summoning him into manhood", then there you go.
    "September 28th 1899: 'Imagine', they say 'a machine one day that might think like a man!' As if this is to be desired. One might almost boast of creating a man who breeds like a pig. Men and women upon all fours, rutting carelessly, ejaculating their filthy little missives into the streets. Alleys and gutters running freely with the careless spill of their conjoinings. The air thick with the whimperings of lust. Bodies streaked with their own emissions. We have created a world where man is so utterly debased he will spray his seed over passers-by. And yet, this is the condition Babbage aspired to."
    "December 23rd 1899: I stand and look at myself in the mirror, penis in hand, [...] And thus I wash my hands and take to bed."
  • The first time you see the spectres of Mandus's sons reach into their chests and pull out their own hearts, it's creepy. Then the game does it again in a totally unrelated context, and it feels like a random jumpscare attempt from some shovelware asset flip.
• Paranoia Fuel: The first trailer ends in several seconds of darkness. A clever viewer expects a Jump Scare to manifest in those seconds. It never does.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Due to the sparse artsy nature of Dear Esther, the news that The Chinese Room would be developing instead of Frictional was met with some... controversy. This was before even the first trailer was released, mind you. After release, many fans have been outraged by the installment being turned into a walking simulator with the removal of the sanity effects and the inventory as well as a reduced emphasis on monster encounters (of which there are only a few in the entire game). That, coupled with the playtime of three-and-a-half hours (barely half that of the first game), has led to lower review ratings.
• Ugly Cute: The pigmen aren't as deformed as the creatures from the first game, they just look like some kind of vaguely humanoid pig animal. Murderous grotesque perversions of nature though they are, they can be seen sitting at a table to eat messily or playing with children's toys, which gives them a surprisingly sympathetic childlike innocence.

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