Time sure does fly by sometimes it seems. We’re already halfway through October and screaming towards 2021, which we can only hope is a much better year than the dumpster fire that has been 2020. While next generation console hype is reaching a peak, don’t forget about the good ol’ PC, specifically the Epic Games Store, and its free games for the week.

From now until next Thursday, you can redeem Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Kingdom New Lands. A Machine for Pigs is something of an untraditional sequel to Amnesia: A Dark Descent, which has been free on the store before, and Kingdom is a 2D adventure and survival game where you must up your kingdom by exploring the land and surviving against nightly attacks.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Kingdom New Lands will be available until October 29th. After that, just in time for Halloween, the free game slate will be Costume Quest 2 and Layers of Fear 2.

Remember TheChineseRoom, better known for creating games like Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture? It’s recently been acquired by Sumo Digital, which is currently developing Crackdown 3 for the Xbox One and Windows 10 PC. The announcement is shocking, considering TheChineseRoom “went dark” with all staff laid off in September 2017.

A blog post from TheChineseRoom co-founder Dan Pinchbeck revealed the news today. “Following the studio’s closure in summer 2017, we were faced with a decision,” the post read. “We knew we didn’t want to just start over, trying to recapture a time in our history where we could push out arthouse titles and survive the process. It was an amazing few years, but it came at a cost, one that I knew I wasn’t about to take on again. And it was time for a change—to make different games, explore new ideas and, if TCR was going to reboot, to evolve into something that opened up new opportunities.”

Pinchbeck revealed that some concepts which were never developed by the studio are still “very much on the table”. These include titles like The 13th Interior, which Pinchbeck and Andrew Crawshaw (designer of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture) created a prototype for.

“The game still needs a little bit of work to nail down some core mechanics, but then it’s finding the right opportunity to roll out the rest of development. It’s very much still in the plan to finish it up at some point. There were also two other concepts we were playing around with—very different types of games for us—and they will remain gently percolating in the background,” said Pinchbeck.

Another project, So Let Us Melt, which was in development for VR platform Google Daydream, may also be revisited. “Injecting more mechanics, building on the gorgeous art and audio the old team created and getting it out to a wider audience,” are the current plans, so there’s a chance that it could arrive on other platforms.

Of course, Sumo Digital is also working on a new game with Pinchbeck, which will be bigger than the previously mentioned titles. “It’s exciting times. A fresh start. If this was a game script, a gravelly-voiced man would probably say something about a ‘new dawn’.”

What are your thoughts on TheChineseRoom being brought back and acquired by Sumo Digital? How will this affect the latter’s future, especially after Crackdown 3 has wrapped? What could the “bigger” title be? For now, all we can do is speculate, so let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Fewer games over the past decade have managed to frighten gamers like Amnesia has and Frictional Games knows it. The developer is collecting three of its most well-known games together with Amnesia: The Dark Descent, The Chinese Room’s Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Amnesia: Justine together into one frightening package called the Amnesia Collection. Which begs the question: Wasn’t Halloween last month?

The launch trailer highlights some of the more terrifying moments from these games including meeting the Shadow for the first time and confronting the Pig Men. The Amnesia Collection will be heading to PS4 and PC, thus bringing the original game to consoles for the first time. As for Amnesia: Justine, think of it as a Portal-esque side story that still maintains the creep factor of the other games.

Amnesia Collection is out now on Steam and PS4. What are your thoughts on the launch trailer and will you be picking it up? Let us know in the comments below.

One of the most influential and best horror games of all time is Amnesia: Dark Descent. And now PlayStation 4 players will have the chance to play it and its expansion and sequel, because the Amnesia Collection has been announced for PlayStation 4 by Frictional Games.

These games were previously available to PC players only, meaning this collection becomes the first time that console players will get to play these games. “From the creators of SOMA, the Amnesia series ushered in a new age of horror gaming. Rather than cut-scenes and forced jump-scares, the Amnesia series wrapped fragile players within its grim embrace, beckoning them to explore and survive amid the darkness as it pulled at the frayed edges of sanity,” the press release accompanying the announcement of the collection reads.

You can check out the announcement trailer for the collection, as well as the list of games available in this package, below.  Amnesia: Collection is set to release on November 22nd digitally.

According to developers TheChineseRoom, also responsible for such games as Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, the initial PS4 build of their upcoming game, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture is now up and running. The announcement came from a series of tweets tweeted from the official twitter account for TheChineseRoom. The tweets read:

“Fixed the DevKit bugging out yesterday which means today is the day – installing the first PS4 build of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture!”

“PS4 build is up and running! … Quite a major threshold to have passed…”

Also, when asked via Twitter whether previous titles from TheChineseRoom, specifically Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, would be updated for release across PlayStation 4, TheChineseRoom responded that, while it would be great to have those games on PS4 but it is not something they are actively working.

Stay tuned to Gamingbolt to see if that changes.

But there was one game which served as the initiation for many into the dark world of horror gaming, kick-starting a bit of a renaissance for first person adventure games and frightening quests (along with innumerable Let’s Play videos). This was Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a relatively simple adventure that had you struggling to regain your memory while outmaneuvering a horrendous shadow. It was tense and the overall lack of information helped establish the frights of the darkness all the better.

"The visuals aid the atmosphere, aptly catering the mood of London on the eve of the 20th century while presenting a stark and macabre air overall."

Frictional has since moved on to other projects, with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs being handled by The Chinese Room, developer of Dear Esther. This is immediately apparent in the treatment of the game, which forgoes an outright delusionary approach in favour of more solid story-telling. You’ll still be playing as an amnesiac, namely Oswald Mandus who struggles to rescue his children and solve the mystery of an odd machine under the directions of the mysterious Engineer.

Diary entries, documents and the like will help provide a bit of information on what’s happening but for the most part, you’ll be comprehending the events as they happen. You’ll also come across the human-esque pig beings and do your bit to run away from them but they don’t quite eschew the same feeling of fright that the unstoppable shadow did in the original.

This isn’t to say that A Machine for Pigs isn’t uniquely scary. Rather, the atmosphere is completely different this time around. There is a feeling of things not quite being what they seem, of a deeper evil at work and a grim reality to be faced. It is a more scaled experience, with a beginning, middle and conclusion but fragmented into different time periods. Not to spoil anything beforehand but the story is well worth the trip, even if it’s nothing very new in today’s day and age. There is a greater hint of mystery involved this time around. We won’t say the horror has been significantly dialled down, given how this still isn’t a game for kids.

"As a horror-filled ride, there isn’t much to note with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs."

The visuals aid the atmosphere, aptly catering the mood of London on the eve of the 20^th century while presenting a stark and macabre air overall. You’ll be exploring a good variety of environments, transitioning from an abandoned house to the sewers beneath and the very confines of the mysterious machine. The art direction is stellar but under-stated. The voice acting thankfully enhances the experience, with the sound effects still being as strong and adding to the creepy atmosphere more than detracting from it.

A Machine for Pigs also differs very strongly from The Dark Descent in terms of gameplay. You won’t be battling for your sanity this time around, struggling to balance between light and dark or carefully conserving fuel in your lantern while collecting tinderboxes (in fact, tinderboxes and oil have been removed entirely – there is no inventory to access either). Encounters with the pig-men don’t lead to your mental well-being suffering and you have an unlimited supply of fuel for your lantern.

This means that new players will be able to acclimatize themselves to the horrific atmosphere without needing to micro-manage their emotions. However, for more experienced players, these very elements enhanced the horrific charm of The Dark Descent. The simplification doesn’t feel odd, but it is obvious more often than not especially when your health automatically regenerates when receiving injuries.

"Diary entries, documents and the like will help provide a bit of information on what's happening but for the most part, you'll be comprehending the events as they happen."

As a horror-filled ride, there isn’t much to note with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. On the one hand, it doesn’t break any new ground or combine several old elements into something staggeringly new like its predecessor. On the other hand, what it does do, it does extremely well, even if it comes off as an entirely different entity overall. You’ll still be peering around corners and turning off your lamp to blend in with your surroundings, thus letting whatever horror is hunting you pass. It delivers a tout narrative in its six hour run time, slowly building up and providing a cohesive whole. It’s not an adrenaline packed experience but does feel sufficiently creepy and provoking enough to leave you in deep thought afterwards.

After Outlast though, it just doesn’t quite feel enough. Hopefully Frictional Games’ Soma will take things forward that much more while giving us a downright terrifying reason not to sleep at night. As it stands, A Machine for Pigs is a dark fantasy and reflection on the infinitely ugly ways of man. Nothing more, nothing less.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Game Overview:

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a survival horror video game developed by The Chinese Room and published by Frictional Games. It is not a direct sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent and features a new setting along with new cast of characters.

The game is available for the Windows, MAC and Linux.

Check out the video walkthrough of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs below and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

For video game guides, tips and wikis, check out our gaming portal here.

How nefarious? Check out the above 26 minute gameplay video for the game, and you’ll agree that no other horror title quite captures that horror of things that go bump in the night like Amnesia.

Despite following up The Dark Descent, A Machine for Pigs will be significantly different in level design and improved AI, although it will stay true to the roots of the series. The game surprisingly started as a mod and was thus expanded after both Frictional and thechineseroom saw the potential inherent (both in the gameplay and for frightening us even more senseless than before).

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs releases on PC, Linux and Mac on September 10th.

According to a tweet from developers, The Chinese Room, a release date has been set for the latest installment in the popular Amnesia series, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. On September 10th, players will be able to indulge in this newest addition to the survival horror series.

Amnesia: A Machine for pigs will act as an indirect sequel to it’s Amnesia predecessor, Amnesia: Dark Desent. While both games are in the same universe, A Machine For Pigs will feature an entirely different plot and cast of characters.

The game will center on the relationship between Oswald Mandus, an industrialist from London, 1899, and his children. After a traumatic trip to Mexico, Mandus returns home plagued by terrifying dreams about a dark and mysterious machines. After a few months, he awakens to hear the roar of the machine in his own home, prompting a series of what we hope to be terrifying afventures.

The game play is reported as being first person survival horror, with the level design reportedly quite different from that of . The basics will be the same as the previous title, but several elements have been added or removed in tune with that The Chinese Room believes fans will appreciate.

Out comes Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game developed by Frictional Games, who already garnered accolades for their work on the Penumbra series. Amnesia: The Dark Descent presented players with a spooky atmosphere, chilling moments and simple yet effective gameplay mechanics.

After recieving critical and commercial acclaim, Frictional Games have now passed on the responsibility of developing the next chapter in the franchise, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs , to thechineseroom.

We got in touch with Dan Pinchbeck, Creative Director on Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and asked him about development progress, gameplay details, his thoughts on the next generation consoles and much more.

Check out the full interview below.

Ravi Sinha: Originally, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs was supposed to be an experimental title but set in the Amnesia universe. What did you see in the game that took it from that stage to being the next game?

Dan Pinchbeck: It’s still set in the same universe as Dark Descent, it was more about the length and complexity of the game that shifted. Originally, we were looking at a really short development cycle, reusing a lot of TDD props and things, more like Justine. But we started off, and wrote the story and kind of looked at what we were doing and it was obvious it needed more time and it would naturally be this bigger, more complicated thing. Which of course meant we could through much more at it in terms of art, audio, etc.

Ravi Sinha: The Dark Descent features tons of psychological horror, relying less on jump scares and more on the atmosphere of dread. Will A Machine for Pigs follow that formula, or put in a few twists of its own?

Dan Pinchbeck: Absolutely, you don’t change a winning formula, and it’s that focus on atmosphere that made us big fans of Dark Descent in the first place. The challenge has been looking to extend that, do some new things for existing fans, keep it fresh and new. But yeah, making sure it still is very much an Amnesia game is really important to us.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent Trailer.

Ravi Sinha: Tell us a bit about the influences behind A Machine for Pigs. Were there any particular horror properties – be it books, paintings, movies and such – when developing the game?

Dan Pinchbeck: I’m a big Steampunk fan, and that was probably the biggest influence. So novels like G W Dahlquist’s Glass Books trilogy, Stephen Hunt, Mark Hodder, Lavie Tidhar alongside the usual Lovecraft fix. And Victorian London is just the most amazing, rich period to work in anyway, it supplies plenty of inspiration. Particularly, it dovetails nicely with the central preoccupation of Dark Descent, this exploration of morality and fear. We really wanted to continue to play with those themes in Machine for Pigs.

Ravi Sinha: What can you tell us about the protagonist Oswald? What is his connection to the events occurring? Will he be another victim of terror like Daniel or is there some deeper role he has to play?

Oh, I don’t want to give too much away. Oswald is very much at the centre of events, although exactly how will become clear as the game progresses. The game opens with him emerging from a terrible fever dream, with the terrifying sense that his children are in mortal danger. The rest you will have to wait and see.

Ravi Sinha: How will A Machine for Pigs tie into the original game exactly? Surely there must be some over-arching evil that links the two (*cough*The Shadow*cough*).

Dan Pinchbeck: I couldn’t possibly say. Discovering those things will be part of the fun for Dark Descent fans.

Ravi Sinha: Speaking of similarities, The Dark Descent was pretty groovy with it’s click and drag style of opening doors. Will we see similar mechanics in A Machine for Pigs? If so, what can you tell us about them?

Dan Pinchbeck: Yeah, it’s still pretty physics based, but that’s hard wired into HPL2 so it’s kind of a given. There’s no inventory this time around though, so the challenge for us has been finding cool and neat ways of keeping everything within the world, and moving objects around, etc. Thats been a lot of fun, and again, havingf a game set in this period of massive invention and crazy engineering makes that great to play with. Light will also still be really important, but we are changing things around a bit there as well to keep it fresh for existing fans.

Ravi Sinha: Can you outline the process of creating a horror title for the PC? How does it differ from, say, a horror story or film?

Dan Pinchbeck: Wow, that’s a good question. I’ve never made any other media, so I’m not entirely sure. I think games have the advantage of player agency, because you are really in the world, doing things, changing things, you are much closer to that action, so it affects you more directly. The big challenge, the thing books can do is to suggest and infer things, which is normally much scarier than actually seeing them – its why most things based around Lovecraft just fail, because it’s the ambiguity in his writing that just let’s your imagination go wild and that’s what is scary.

That’s the biggest trade off I think. You are representing stuff visually, so you have new opportunities but it’s also something you have to be careful with. And I just think games are intrinsically scarier than film. But taking into account all the possible player actions is tricky. When we first play tested, we had a player spend twenty minutes collecting all the moveable items from the far corners of a level, then stacking them up into this elaborate tower, climbing it, jumping out of the world and then saying “the game’s broken”.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs Trailer.

Ravi Sinha: Just how far will A Machine for Pigs go to disturb/horrify gamers? Because the basic premise of the game indicates nothing but dark days ahead.

Dan Pinchbeck: Oh, it’s pretty bleak. You have the fear that surrounds you, terrifies you while you are playing. But I hope we’ve also created something that will stick with you afterwards and still be upsetting and frightening you days later.

Ravi Sinha: What are your thoughts on the next generation of consoles such as the PlayStation 4? You guys had released The Dark Descent on the PC. Does the 8GB GDDR5 RAM and the easy to develop games for type architecture appeal to you?

Dan Pinchbeck: Well, Dark Descent was Frictional, not us, but we released Dear Esther on PC. The word on the street is that PS4 is terrific to work with, especially compared to PS3. That’s always attractive.

Ravi Sinha: The Next Xbox is rumored to blocked used games and will follow an always on policy. What are your thoughts on the same?

Dan Pinchbeck: I’m ambivalent about used games – a used game makes the developers no money, which means you are hurting developers buying them. Especially given you can pick up older games really quickly and easily on sales, where the developers actually get a cut, I think if you love games as a medium, you should be doing that wherever you can. I think blocking is not so good though, I think it’s better to work on the basis that most people are basically honest and do the right thing than to over-police it.

Always on.. Well, unless its a multi-player game there’s no reason for it, it seems like a pure marketing and DRM exercise, and I think it’s really intrusive. If I buy a game, I want to own it, so I can transfer it to any of my devices, play when I want, where I want, on or offline. It’s part of this horrible conceptual shift like iTunes where although it looks like you are buying media, actually you only really are renting access to it, and I have a pretty big problem with that.

Ravi Sinha: Will we see A Machine for Pigs on any console at all in the days to come?

Dan Pinchbeck: That’s going to be down to Frictional. It’d be nice, sure.

Ravi Sinha: The Dark Descent started this internet culture where users shared their horrifying experiences on YouTube. Do you think A Machine for Pigs will have such an impact?

Dan Pinchbeck: I really hope so! I love that side of things with Dear Esther, where there’s this big amazing community of people sharing their experiences. I think it’s an amazing part of gaming culture, so I’d certainly hope we inspire people like that.

Ravi Sinha: What are your thoughts on the Oculus Rift VR device? Surely something like this seems like the next evolution in the horror games cycle.

Dan Pinchbeck: Maybe, but I’m really shortsighted and those kind of devices, like 3D, screw with my eyesight and give me headaches, so I’m not instinctively drawn to them. I think my basic take on it is that I don’t think there’s been a case yet where 3D has made a bad film good, or a good film great. I think it’ll be the same with games.

System Shock 2 is still one of the best, most scary games ever made and it’s pretty old, the graphics are pretty dated. But the crucial thing is you just don’t care or notice. If a game, or book, or film, or whatever is well designed, and gets under your skin, that kind of stuff is really just window dressing. At least for the time being. I’m sure eventually well figure out how to make things that are super optimised for new tech, but it shouldn’t be the driving force for design.

Ravi Sinha: If you could choose one major horror sequel to develop, what would it be, and what would you do with it?

Dan Pinchbeck: STALKER. Every time. I’d love to get let loose on The Zone. I’d crank it back towards the SoC model, more emptiness, loneliness, dead spaces, dark corners, dread and anxiety. The descent into the X18 labs is still a high watermark in terror in gaming.

Special thanks to Jens from Frictional Games for making this interview possible.