![]() Pinchbeck's penchant for snarling romanticised prose extends to all angles as protagonist Oswald Mandus' bleak cynicism encompasses all walks of life. This is a profoundly inventive, almost comically "literary" way to describe shagging that sums up the character's worldview, provides a vivid image to the reader, and arguably still manages to be perversely erotic in its own putrid way. We have created a world where man is so utterly debased he will spray his seed over passers-by." Jeffrey's slightly spoilery mid-game demonstration of the various reasons he loves Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Bodies streaked with their own emissions. The air thick with the whimperings of lust. Alleys and gutters running freely with the careless spill of their conjoinings. "Men and women upon all fours, rutting carelessly, ejaculating their filthy little missives into the streets. Normally the old adage is to "show, not tell", but it's hard to argue with developer The Chinese Room when Pinchbeck describes poor people fornicating as such: While the ghostly streets of 1899 London are largely left vacant, we're able to understand protagonist Oswald Mandus' revulsion to society by his scrawls strewn about town. Yet it's still an outrageously disquieting game, because the most striking aspects of Pigs are the ones not shown but rather implied. Pigs likewise deftly avoids the usual clichés with surprisingly little gore or on-screen violence, its action sequences are slim to nil, and the monsters are portrayed sympathetically as often as malevolent (though I'll confess that the spooky spectral children were a tad trite). It's never quite clear what Thom Yorke is yammering on about in Radiohead's seminal album, and most of the songs lack a chorus and are comprised of peculiar discordant sounds, but the overall ambiance is bewilderingly haunting while avoiding the usual melancholy dirges one typically pulls from to achieve the same effect. It's a bit like the first time you listened to Kid A. The words, visuals, and sounds add flavour without providing a proper concrete narrative blueprint from which to navigate. Where it seems most games these days are trying to emulate movies, Pigs is more like a poem or a song. That it's so hard to grasp only adds to its charm. ![]() Instead of focusing on a pat little tale, it creates an atmosphere of dread so potent that the conventional criteria of what we look for in a game - things like puzzles, plot, win/lose conditions - are thrown completely out the window in favour of an abstract, wondrous experience that hits notes other games simply don't. Pigs, as I'll call it for short, hangs its remarkable artistic achievements (Dan Pinchbeck's flowery, rotten prose Jessica Curry's screeching, shrapnel bomb of a score Sindre Grønvoll's's Grand Guignol labyrinthine environments) around the most threadbare of plots. ![]() I don't think it's meant to when even its creator admits that he has "two or three fairly contradictory interpretations of what might be going on at the end of Pigs at the same time". ![]() So get ready to blast off in a rocket fuelled Starfield performance preview.Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs doesn't make a whole lot of sense and that's fine. We also compare the improvements over the previous showing, enhancements within the engine, and much more. The biggest question after the show(s) was: why is it 30fps on Xbox Series X and Series S and not 60fps? In this IGN Performance preview, we dive into the details shared by the team, the revealed PC minimum and recommended specifications, and how the Creation Engine 2 works, comparing the previous games to gauge some of the potential reasons why the team might have chosen 30fps. With Starfield being the center of the Xbox 2023 Showcase last week, Bethesda gave us a deep dive into one of the biggest games this generation. ![]()
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