The new Amnesia game, a horrifying collaboration between Frictional Games and The Chinese Room, will be released September 10. A Machine for Pigs is explicitly for pigs, but the devs have been kind enough to allow humans to buy it for $20/£13 on Steam and GOG. Pre-purchasing, however, brutally hacks 20% off the price, exposing the oozing, gelatinous innards of capitalism. Don't touch the wound. It bites.

As does Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where half the fun is watching other people cope with its intoxicating paced terror. This is an indirect sequel—a "fresh and new approach to the Amnesia world"—with an updated engine, and Frictional Games notably called in the story exploration experience of Dear Esther developer The Chinese Room to help. Instead of Dear Esther's sober reflection, though, the goal here is a game that will "bury its snout into your ribs" and "eat your heart."

You could soberly reflect on death by pigs, but I'd rather throw some whiskey at the problem. And then set it on fire. Whiskey-marinated pork chops, anyone?

To coincide with IGF, PAX, GDC, OMG and WTF, Steam have slung up one of their impromptu sales, discounting tons of indie games to ensure that our libraries continue to heave under the sheer weight of unplayed games. How nice of them. I hope you've hidden your wallet after last time, because there are some cracking deals to be had, including Super Hexagon, Binding of Isaac and Terraria for silly money.

There's no countdown, so I'm assuming the many games on sale are going to stay the same price until the sale ends on March 29th (the 'Featured' games will likely rotate day by day, without offering any additional savings). There's a lot of games going cheap - more than is evident from the main page - so be sure to poke around for the ones you're interested in. Here are few of the better offers:

FTL - £3.49 (50% off)
Hotline Miami - £3.49 (50% off)
To The Moon - £2.79 (60% off)
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - £3.24 (75% off)
Miasmata - £5.99 (50% off)
Lone Survivor - £3.39 (50% off)
The Blackwell Bundle - £3.74 (75% off)
Retro City Rampage - £3.99 (67% off)
Ultratron, which came out like yesterday - £3.49 (50% off)
Euro Truck Simulator 2 - £12.49 (50% off)

Hello, fans of Amnesia: The Dark Descent! Are you anxiously awaiting the sequel, A Machine for Pigs? Are you interested in getting your first-person survival horror fix in the meantime with an excellent Amnesia mod? If so, then I have some bone-chillingly good news: there's a lengthy custom story called The Great Work that will impress you with its design and writing while simultaneously scaring the poo out of you.

The Great Work buckles you into the quivering boots of Charles Longden, one of a pair of archeologists investigating the crumbling German castle of Minneburg. Your partner, Jane, disappears one morning, and rather than doing the sensible thing (fleeing the castle and answering any questions from your colleagues with "Jane who?") you descend into the bowels of Minneburg to find out what happened to her. After a bit of exploring, it's evident that the castle holds many secrets and horrors, and as is often the case with secret-and-horror-holding castles, the only way to get out is to go deeper in.

Gaze, mortal, upon the first ever gear puzzle that does not require finding and attaching a missing gear!

The early puzzles are a nice mix: a locked door here, a hidden lever there, a bit of machinery to mend so you can open a massive metal door that should DEFINITELY NOT BE OPENED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. There are also notes and journal entries to collect, and they're impressively and efficiently written, subtly filling in a bit of back-story, providing some foreshadowing, and containing useful hints for puzzles you'll need to solve. And, of course, while you're carefully rationing your tinderboxes and peeping into desk drawers, there are plenty of scares. An abrupt growl from a darkened corridor will give you a chill, a door opening on its own will stop you in your tracks, and a door opening because something horrifying is opening will OH GOD RUN AWAY AND DON'T LOOK AT IT

At no point in history has someone touched a spooky glowing altar and then later said "Best decision I ever made."

A deeper, darker level of the castle introduces you to a collection of prison cells and mind games. Wasn't I in this cell earlier? There was just a skull on the table then, but now there's a skull and a dismembered torso. Or is this a different cell? Wait, is there a severed arm there now too? Deeper past the cell block lies a sanctuary with more puzzles to unlock and your first dabblings in alchemy. And, players of Amnesia will remember the nerve-jangling, sanity-shredding Shadow, which returns to chase you through the castle, cutting off your escape routes with walls of mucus and making you curse the fact that doors only swing in one direction (namely, opposite the direction you're frantically pushing or pulling).

In construction, this is known as a load-bearing ectoplasmic mucus web.

After a couple hours of creeping around, solving puzzles, and fleeing the corpses that weren't quite as dead as I'd wished they were, I finally, thankfully, escaped the castle of horrors... only to witness the words "Chapter 2" appear on my screen. What had felt like a decent bit of modded horror turned out to be only the first of a total of seven meaty chapters in The Great Work, which practically stands on its own as a complete game.

Throughout, the writing and custom voice work are both excellent (though the accents are perhaps a bit unconvincing), the chills and scares are well-paced and well-placed, and the level design is just labyrinthine enough to make you feel nervous and unsure without making you feel completely lost.

This stately mansion looks warm and safe. And it is. Briefly.

The puzzles are of varying difficulty, and can occasionally be quite challenging. I was baffled for a while at one point in Chapter 2, when it appeared I had followed the alchemical steps properly, only to later discover another series of laboratory instruments in different room that also needed to be utilized. The mod's author himself admits some of the puzzles are a bit tough and has been revising them slightly in updates, and even goes so far as to link YouTube solutions, by chapter, in the tutorials section of the mod's page. I found myself stumped a few times, but the careful re-reading of collected notes and the close examination of my surroundings (plus, plenty trial and error) eventually got me unstuck.

The story of The Great Work is also quite interesting, and the author did a fair amount of homework in an admirable effort to root his story in real history. It harkens back to a collection of actual alchemists and scholars, the Invisible College, and the search for the Philosopher's Stone, the alchemical substance that was fabled to turn base metals into gold.

If you're looking for spooky thrills, challenging puzzles, and an enjoyable story to tide you over until Amnesia: A Machine of Pigs is released, The Great Work will definitely light that candle. You can find it Mod DB.

How to install

Once you'd downloaded the .zip file, extract all the items into Amnesia's 'custom_stories' folder.

Retail version: Program Files/Amnesia - The Dark Descent/redist/custom_stories
Steam version: Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/Amnesia The Dark Descent/custom_stories

Frictional's Jens Nilsson has posted a status update on their horror sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Nilsson says the team have now received the final version of the game from The Chinese Room - the Dear Esther devs who have been handling the bulk of development duties. Frictional still need to tweak, test and translate the game, and expect to be ready for release by Q2 2013. That means we're due a flood of definitely not exaggerated YouTube reaction Let's Plays at some point this summer.

A Machine for Pigs was originally due out Halloween 2012. Why the delay? "Originally we thought it would be a short, experimental game set in the universe of Amnesia, but thechineseroom had a vision that was bigger than that," writes Nilsson. "As their work progressed, the potential for a much greater project emerged. What we ended up with is no longer what we had first imagined, but a fully fledged Amnesia game. A different kind of Amnesia, but definitely not a short experiment."

Back in October, Marsh spoke to The Chinese Room's Dan Pinchbeck about the scale of the game, and its relation to the original Amnesia.

Are hard-as-hell indie games enough to satiate our hunger for a challenge, or should mainstream developers quit trying to appease everyone and start really testing us? In this Face Off from our archives (originally published October 2012), Executive Editor Evan Lahti gives former Senior Editor Josh Augustine a hard time for his willingness to take it easy.

Make your own arguments in the comments—debate team captains: it’s your time to shine.

Evan: Focus testing is the enemy of experimentation and innovation. It widens the audience of a game by watering down the experience. Portal was harder, and better, than Portal 2, which forewent feats like mid-air maneuvering almost completely. Skyrim gave us a detailed wilderness where falling into a freezing lake meant nothing and dragons weren't much more than giant mosquitoes. Remember what dying was like in Diablo and Diablo II? You had to bravely fight back to your corpse to recover your gear with whatever rented junk you could pull together. I miss that brutality, and the feeling of, y’know, actually losing something.

Josh: And Diablo III offers that: in Inferno and Hell difficulty. Either of which can be played with permadeath on. Knock yourself out.

Evan: I’d love to, but Blizzard insists that I can only earn the right to play on a difficulty that can actually kill me by spending hours churning through Children’s Mode, erm, Normal. For every new character.

Josh: So you’re asking to die more? Dying isn't inherently fun or interesting. It’s not the secret sauce of game design. Even if games are a little less hard, it’s only because we’ve grown out of the binary win/lose states of the ’80s and ’90s. Those were motivated by a desire either to get people to put in more coins or to artificially lengthen 8- and 16-bit games that were otherwise short and simple. We’re in an age of gaming diversity and accessibility. More people are playing games; that’s great.

Evan: It’s not about dying more. It’s about wanting game design that uses difficulty creatively. Look at DayZ: you spawn in a 225km2 world with no weapon, no map, and no compass. You have to eat and drink. Everything is trying to kill you, and death is permanent. Almost every weapon has discrete ammo. If I’m good enough, I can read the stars to find my way.

It’s completely brutal, but more than 400,000 people flocked to it in just a couple months. It’s led Arma 2 to the top of the Steam sales charts for almost as long. Why? Because it does something so few modern games do: it respects your ability to figure it out yourself.

Josh: Difficulty’s out there if you want it. Super Meat Boy, Dustforce, Dungeons of Dredmor, Legend of Grimrock, Amnesia, Mount & Blade... all of these games are variously unforgiving. Dark Souls’ PC release is called the “Prepare To Die Edition.” Dota 2 and League of Legends are making judgmental, complex multiplayer games mainstream again. In Tribes: Ascend, I have to make mid-air skillshots at 225km an hour. What more do you want?

Evan: All the games you mentioned are from independent studios. They’re from the fringes. No one in the mainstream is embracing consequence-driven gaming, and as long as that’s the case, I think game design will continue to stagnate. I’m bored of regenerating health and checkpoints. And MMOs, honestly, they’re some of the greatest offenders of this because they were born from a model where players were paying an additional fee. Almost all of their design is based around appeasement. There’s no concept of failure or loss or struggle built into them. Every victory is just an eventuality: if you grind or pay enough, you’ll get what you want.

Josh: Even if what you were saying wasn’t a complete generalization (have you played TERA or Rift or DC Universe Online? They’re all totally tough)—a lot of people relish the social freedom and friendly atmosphere that MMOs provide by not punishing you dramatically just because you aggroed one too many cave goblins, or whatever. Difficulty isn't some one-setting-suits-all concept.

Evan: Challenge counts, and modern games are missing it. Without it, we’re just passively consuming content, going through the motions, acting out a puppet show of animations, particle effects, and sound. Even with immediate access to YouTube walkthroughs the moment a game is released, most developers are still desperately afraid of upsetting players or scaring them away. When I play something like DayZ, I feel feelings. My pulse changes. I regret decisions. I get mad. That’s valuable.

Josh: Well, while you’re getting mad that games don’t make you mad enough, I’ll be having fun.

As reported earlier, The Chinese Room have released the latest trailer for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the follow-up to Frictional Games’ deeply unsettling Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Set in Victorian London, some sixty years after the events of the first game, Pigs isn’t a straight continuation of that story, but a wholly new tale set in the same universe. That doesn’t mean it won’t be looking to recapture the same sense of giddy terror that the Dark Descent induced in its hapless, cringing players, however. We got in touch with The Chinese Room’s boss-man and creator of Dear Esther, Dan Pinchbeck, to discover how the scares shake down.

“It's fairly true to the spirit of the original game,” says Pinchbeck. “There's a definite case of ‘don't fix what isn't broken’. We're not going to be arming the player up at all - you're still going to be hiding for most of it and running and peaking and not wanting to open doors and things like that. I think that's kind of the core spirit of the game really, so we don't want to take that away from the player.”

That said, Pinchbeck hints at some intriguing changes: “We've tried to do some stuff which will keep the player on their toes a little bit, to stop them from being able to play the same way. So there's changes to the way some of the things behave in the game. It's difficult to talk about that without giving too much away really.”



What can be revealed is that Pigs' relocation to the turn of the 20th century alters much of the aesthetic and philosophy of the game.

“It's New Year’s Eve 1899,” says Pinchbeck. “Because it's set later than Dark Descent, there's an awful lot you can do in terms of technology. The game focuses on industrialisation, so there's an awful lot of machinery you can bring into the game; brilliant factories and engines and all those new power sources. You have this mix between invention and science exploding, and this real obsession with the supernatural, the occult and spiritualism all at the same time."

“By catapulting the game into the industrial period," continues Pinchbeck, "instead of magicians we have the early capitalists and empire builders. What would they make of this supernatural stuff if they got their hands on it? And that in itself is such an interesting thing to play around with.”

Your own character embodies this tension, a wealthy industrialist called Oswald Mandus.

“Part of the game is him picking out his own path, and kind of understanding who he is, where he's come from and what's going on. As it progresses hopefully the player will, in a similar way to Amnesia, feel like they're descending not just into an underground labyrinth, but into the head of the character. We have an absolutely fantastic villain, too, that I'm really really pleased with and very proud of, who I think is maybe even deeper and more than Alexander was in Dark Descent.”



So, being set in Victorian London, do we get to meet any other Victorian Londoners? Pinchbeck says we do, suggesting that there won’t be quite the sense of isolation that its predecessor explored.

“We've just taken delivery of a couple of what have been codenamed ‘civilians’ at the moment,” he says. “So yeah, there's a bit more evidence of humanity. It's not just you and the Grunts in the way that Dark Descent was. We definitely have more of a sense of a hope, of life in the setting. It’s important to us as a company to get that atmosphere of a real, deep, engaging world and place. We want to create the impression that you are, as the player, sitting there in Victorian London and the world is moving around you; you're not holed up in isolation in the middle of nowhere with no one else about.”

Although it uses a modified version of the HPL 2 engine used for Dark Descent, Pigs will be pushing it to its limits to render this more expansive setting.

“We have about five things,” says Pinchbeck, referring to the game’s varied locales. “We just started scripting on our exterior thing - our big exterior level, which is really nice. The player moves from building to building - there are outside linking sections, there are scenes that take you away from the streets, which is really nice. So it's less like one single building and more of a complex.”



If this more mechanised world and bustling cityscape sound like a departure from Dark Descent’s lonely, claustrophobic medievalism, then Pinchbeck guarantees a throughline between the two stories, even if it’s not an explicit sequel in a narrative sense.

“It's set within the same universe, so there are references to things which happen in Dark Descent, and players who played Dark Descent might spot a continuation of the kind of ideas that were in the first game. But it's completely unrelated, the central plotline of it. So, I guess you could say that quite a few of the Lego bricks are shared with Dark Descent, but we're making very different things out of them. If that's not too pompous a metaphor.”

Horror sequel, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, has a new and suitably unheimlich trailer, showing off the game's gloomy Victorian locales and the terrible contraptions which lie beneath them. A Machine For Pigs is the follow-up to Frictional Games' indie classic, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, though this time development is helmed by The Chinese Room, makers of Dear Esther. It's not a straight continuation from the last Amnesia game, either - the story takes place sixty years later, on the eve of the 20th century, and swaps the dank confines of the Prussian Brennenburg Castle for the smoggy streets of London.

The Chinese Room's Dan Pinchbeck also has a special request to make of viewers: "What we really need are some screams," he says. "We want fans to record themselves screaming, puking and freaking out. Tape it all, send it through to us, and we'll sift through it and the best stuff will end up going into a background mix for one of the levels."

You can send your submitted howls of anguish and agony as Wavs, Oggs or MP3s to piggies@thechineseroom.co.uk. It shouldn't be too hard to get yourself into such a mindset having watched the trailer. Industrialisation and invention collide with sinister supernatural forces, and for all the Victorian era's nascent modernity, it doesn't seem that technology can do much to stave off the terror. We've spoken to Dan Pinchbeck at length about the game, and we'll be posting that interview later today.