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[Froge]

Finally beat AAMFP (7 hours of gameplay). Someone tell me if I understood the story right:

Spoiler below!

Let me get this straight: Oswald goes on vacation to Mexico, finds an orb, and touching it splits his soul in two. He gets visions from the orb about WW1 and Hitler's gas chambers and sees his children dying on the Somne. Some time later, or maybe right in Mexico, Oswald gives mercy killing to his children. Can someone clarify on the exact time?

Anyways he uses the orb and vitae from his great uncle (Alexander?) to create a machine that he also infused the other half of his soul into. The machine takes in people - mainly orphans and the poor, but later also the rich - kills them, and then vitae-resurrects them into pig-things. Mandus' goal is to use the pigs to kill everyone on Earth and make them the planet's new inhabitants. During the game, he realizes that committing genocide to prevent genocide is kind of a stupid thing which is why he decides to fuck that plan.

Is that right?

Review:

Spoiler below!

Summary: Passable as a horror game. Very tense moments of buildup and scary as fuck monster encounters. Story is also great, not as believable or as engaging as the original, but still a nice concept.

Main points:


-The game's worst flaw is the linearity. I didn't feel that it was me exploring the machine factory, I felt that I was observing the story of Mandus and his dark descent while occasionally telling him to hide so that he doesn't become pig feed.

-Mandus was a bit hard to relate to. It doesn't seem like he's ever scared of anything (besides the very occasional gasp). He must be some sort of testosteronal badass.

-Story was a bit too grand and wide scale. I completely understand Mandus' intention, it's just that what he did (that is, building the machine and reconstructing people into pigs) is just too cartoonish in my opinion.

-Soundtrack was a bit strange at times. Calming piano / jukebox music doesn't transition well to dark, unnerving ambiance. Pig chase theme also not as jarring as ATDD's metal grinding, though interestingly enough, it reminded me of the music that plays in Silent Hill 2 when fighting nurses in the hospital, probably because of the industrial beat.

-Story was a bit hard to piece together, and lacked a coherent "big reveal" moment.

-As many people have mentioned, the game feels like Dear Esther 2 and not Amnesia 2. We could also call it Amnesia: Final Fantasy XIII edition.

Comparison with ATDD:

(No, I haven't read anyone else's reviews so this is my opinion alone. Yes, I know what Elysium syndrome is, I saw the movie.)

Spoiler below!

Unsurprisingly, I like ATDD better.

Let me start by saying that I did not go into the original ATDD without first watching an LP of the game. Somewhere in the middle of the LP I thought to myself: "Man, I want to play and experience that for myself!" a reaction that only one other horror game has incited with me, Ib. This is because ATDD felt very vast to me. Through the hub-based exploration structure, I thought that my journey through the game was my own experience because I could visit all the places in my own order and solve all the puzzles in my own way.

Daniel was a blank slate and a much more relatable character than Mandus. From the very beginning of AAMFP, details of Mandus' personal life are revealed to you, and it quickly becomes very clear that he's a rich and insane bastard. Which most of us aren't. Most of us young adult or adolescent players also don't have children, or ever held the capability to order servants around. Throughout AAMFP I felt like I was playing as some upstuck posh snob who probably deserved most of the shit that happened to him.

On the other hand, Daniel is almost entirely a victim of circumstance. Throughout the game, you really sympathize with him because you don't know what he's done, all we really understand is that he has a goal (kill Alexander) and he's suffering through hell to reach that goal. Then when we reach the nave and see all the torture rooms, it is a horrifying reveal but does nothing to make us sympathize less with Daniel. His situation was extreme, and we know that he honestly feels guilty and has deep regret for everything he's done. There's the most important implication: 'Daniel could have been me.'

None of us could have been Oswald. He really doesn't seem too different from your average cynical teenager who just discovered that the world can be a piece of shit and just wants to kill everything.

Oh yeah, and TDD also felt much more eldritch and loretastic than AAMFP, though that's mostly due to the setting. I was much more scared of the shadow and gatherers when they first appeared than the pigs in AAMFP because I believed they were something truly hideous and unthinkably evil, whereas the pigs are comprehensible manmade creations.

Also, Alexander beats Oswald's shadow self in terms of villainy by a large margin. The baron has no remorse, and all his vile actions are done for personal gain. When I reached the Inner Sanctum all I wanted to do was punch that naked old fucker in the face. On the other hand, Oswald's shadow self was kind of....boring. He didn't even feel threatening to me. At least ATDD made you experience the torture rooms and see Daniel's insanity up close. All we know in AAMFP was that a ton of organ laceration and surgery happened to the people that got thrown into the machine, but we never see or hear their personal suffering.

It's like reading about the deaths of 6 million jews during WW2 versus seeing the deaths of just a handful up close. Watch the movie 'The Pianist' for example, it is truly horrifying to see how each individual jewish civilian died than to simply read the statistic of their cumulative deaths.

Overall rating for AAMFP: 7.3 / 10

Spoiler below!

Comparatively, I'd give ATDD like a 9.6 / 10.