"We've been misinterpreted a bit recently as being this rabidly anti-mechanics company.
If we're doing anything that's essentially damaging that, then we ought to not be putting it in there."ĭespite this minimalist design philosophy, Pinchbeck maintains that he likes mechanics-based games, but only if the mechanics are justified. A key thing about this game is about that sense of immersion. But when we kept doing this we talked a lot about it with Thomas and Jens at Frictional, and we felt like we were pushing the player out of the world and into a different space where they were just worrying about their supplies. "When we first started making the game we were kind of looking at this and we originally had this other idea, a very early thing where it was all sort of based around infection and disease and rot and you were trying to find medicines to stay sane. It seemed like quite a lot of people shared that sort of feeling about it," Pinchbeck explains. "When I was playing The Dark Descent, I figured out you could exploit the sanity mechanic pretty easily, and then it stopped being something that had a real function in terms of the experience I was having. Why's that the case? Many of Pigs' harshest critics have attributed this to The Chinese Room nixing the first game's sanity mechanic that caused your character's vision to get blurry and imaginary cockroaches to crawl over your face and make skittering, crunching sounds in the back of your skull when gazing upon an enemy or staying in the dark for too long.Īs it turns out, Pinchbeck was originally planning to introduce a new variant of this mechanic based around disease, but ultimately felt like players would inevitably find a way to exploit it - just as they did the first game's sanity mechanic. Speaking to Pinchbeck over Skype, it's impossible to bring up A Machine For Pigs without first discussing its most criticised aspect: it's simply not as scary as its predecessor, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs' soundtrack - by studio co-director (and Pinchbeck's wife), Jessica Curry - is on Spotify and it's incredible. Instead, it may surprise you to learn than Pinchbeck is an extraordinarily approachable, modest man who put 170 hours into Just Cause 2 and argues that Doom is an under-appreciated gem of video game storytelling.
It would be easy to imagine Pinchbeck as a snooty artiste. The Chinese Room's games are often characterised by their arcane prose, abstract storytelling, and an almost complete lack of conventional game mechanics. The British indie developer made waves in the industry a few years back with his experimental Half-Life 2 mod, Dear Esther - a project Pinchbeck and his company The Chinese Room remade as a standalone release last year - and more recently he headed development on the divisive Amnesia sequel A Machine For Pigs. You may not know Dan Pinchbeck by name, but chances are you've heard of some of his games.
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