We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Okay, I've been playing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and I'm...let's see...



Alright, three hours in.

Observations so far:

• You can't pick up every gosh darned thing anymore, not really a downside though due to the changed nature of the puzzles (see below).
  
• The Half Life 2-esque physics puzzles of "pile a bunch of objects on this seesaw" and the Monkey Island style inventory recombination riddles have been replaced with "find the objects you need in this level and carry them to where they need to go," which sounds a lot worse than it actually is. It's easily figured out while in game and actually results in situations that feel a lot less contrived than some of those in the first game.
  
• No inventory to speak of (or at least, none that show up three hours in). This works nicely with the reworked puzzle mechanics.
  
• The lantern behaves more like a flashlight and doesn't use fuel - it does, however, flicker a LOT, to the point where I'm not sure how much of its misbehaving is scripted and how much of it is general tone-setting.
  
• Looking at monsters doesn't make your vision go all wonky, which is just fine, because they generally don't sit still long enough for you to get a good look at them anyway, and tighter corridors and closer spaces mean you need to actually see where their silhouettes are sometimes in order to sneak around them.
  
• The story is looking interesting at the moment - the main character's motivations are extremely simple ("gotta find my kids"), which he repeats in almost every journal entry (a new one will pop up when you enter most rooms, as the game helpfully informs you early on), but the actual big deets are dispensed in the same way they were in The Dark Descent; that is, through notes found around the levels. They're pretty interesting ones, too, although that might just be the mechanic in me speaking.
  
• Level design is a lot tighter, and the general quality of the visuals is better too. Some areas are large and let you meander about freely while others clamp you down tightly, but they're a nice mix and both of them are enjoyable and play their parts nicely.
  

Or you could just go with my roommate's declaration of, "dude, this game is spooky."

Either way, I'm enjoying it, at least so far.

Unrelated and a bit snippy:

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SpoilerDear Esther purposefully eschewed gameplay because it was a narrative experiment about delivering a disjointed narrative with randomized snippets of a story. Of course it cared enough to tell you the story - the game was the story.

Also unrelated but not snippy: Ways of History looks pretty cool! I'm giving it a shot, enjoy your coin...thingies!