Dear Esther's Dan Pinchbeck Talks Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

We had an excellent time getting scared out of our wits with Frictional Games’ PC survival horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Thechineseroom’s Dan Pinchbeck, lead on Dear Esther, is taking the helm on the sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. The game, due out next year, is set in the Victorian age, where humans are being trampled underfoot for the sake of progress. Macabre machines and twisted inventions are sure to chill players exploring the new game. We’re so eager to reenter the chilling world of Amnesia that we chatted with Pinchbeck about getting involved with Frictional and why he chose the Victorian era.

How did you come to get involved with Frictional Games and the Amnesia series?

I’ve known Frictional for a few years now. I was always a big fan of Penumbra. We made a survival horror game called Korsakovia in 2009. I didn’t know that Frictional had played it and liked what we were trying to do. When Amnesia was coming out I got an email from Thomas Grip saying he liked Korsokovia and what we were doing with Dear Esther and he asked me to play Amensia. I told him I had the game pre-ordered for so long that he didn’t even want to know about it. We just got talking. I think we share really similar ideas about games, what games should be, and about player experience, and horror, and things like that. We’ve been talking on and off ever since. We met at GDC Europe last year. Frictional is overhauling their engine in a very big way for an unannounced game that is still a few years away. They don’t want to have this really long period without getting a game out and want to keep their fans happy. So they told me they were looking to ask a developer to make an Amnesia game to fill this gap. He asked if I was interested in that. At that point, we (thechineseroom) were getting close to launching Dear Esther, but we still had a few months to go until launch and we had no idea how Dear Esther was going to do. It seemed like a perfect project to take on. It was also hugely exciting. The chance to make an Amnesia game is a fanboy’s dream come true. It wasn’t a difficult decision. 

How is Frictional involved in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs?

They are executive producing the game. Effectively, they pay for the game and then we’re going off making it. Every few months we drop a bunch of levels on them, they give us very extensive feedback, and we work through that crazy process together. And they’re on hand to support any kind of technical issues we have with the engine. We have this really nice relationship where we’ve got an enormous amount of creative freedom but we also have all this support whenever we want it. They’re great to work with in terms of honing the levels down because they’re so clued in now for how to creative the right kind of experiences for horror games. We’ve got access to some of the best horror designers out there. They’re helping us make this the best game it possibly can be. They steer and support us as we go along.

Tell me about your history with horror

I think like a lot of people I went through the teenage phase of being obsessed with horror. In terms of games, I started off [with this PhD project] on first-person shooters. A lot of that was on content, and how content shapes player experience. So horror kept coming up again and again. A lot of themes in horror which are very strongly supported in gameplay, such as being alone and artificially changing the sense of threat in the environment so someone doesn’t get overly confident or cocky about knowing what’s out there. These are all techniques that give horror an awful lot of punch, whether it’s in a book or a film as well. I think there’s a natural fit between being interested in single-player games and being interested in horror because they’re so similar. When it came down to Dear Esther and Korsakovia it just fit well with the way I write and the types of experiences I like to have. If you try to get players to have very strong, emotional reactions to a game, horror is one of the genres where it’s easiest to get under players’ skin. When you get under their skin you can get them to be open to other kinds of emotional reactions as well. Ironically, going with something that’s designed to scare the wits out of someone, you can get to other kinds of emotions that are slightly harder to get to like empathy or sadness. It’s just a natural fit to the kind of stuff that I’m into.

Dear Esther was relatively free from gameplay, whereas Amnesia is a more actively involved experience. What do you want gameplay in Amnesia to do that couldn’t be done in Dear Esther? 

The way I think about it is in terms of interaction we talk about pressing a button and seeing something happen onscreen. I think there’s a huge amount of interaction that happens in the player’s mind. You’re being fed all these images and ideas, and you’re interpreting them all the time. So there’s a type of interaction with the screen because the way in which you interpret what you’re picking up changes the actions that you might take from that point onward. You can widen out what it means to have an interactive experience to interpret what’s coming out to you as well just the way you behave. Dear Esther was about trying to explore that kind of interaction space, so there wasn’t a lot of binary input and output, but there was still a lot of processing of what was going on. It happened in the player’s head rather than the system. I think that kind of idea is something that we’re always interested in, but with Amnesia there were bits that were really, really effective and engaged players on a deep level. Dear Esther was about trying to say “Is that enough?” to just have that in a game experience. The natural next question from that is how do you take the best bits from that and put it into something which is more traditional? Can we have a game that still keeps that level of emotional engagement but is ticking the boxes in terms of traditional gameplay, as well? Amnesia is a useful stepping stone for that, because it’s fairly traditional in some ways but quietly radical in others. One of the things it really does is it’s about buying the player emotional time and space to have this amazing emotional reaction to what’s going on, particularly in the terms of the horror in Amnesia, which is really self-generated. That’s a really natural fit with the types of things we were doing with Dear Esther. It’s the kind of focus on story and emotional space that should slot into the Amnesia architecture pretty well. Because an awful lot of that in the Dark Descent is you walking down a corridor or hiding in a cupboard, doing all the work of the graphics card imagining what’s on the other side of the door from you. That’s a weirdly parallel thing to what’s going on in Dear Esther, having a bunch of ideas thrown at you and really you’re building the story that’s just out of reach just as the Grunt is always just outside the door in Amnesia: Dark Descent. 

How did Amnesia: The Dark Descent grab you when you first played through it?

The bit that first got me is when you’re in the archives and you see the back of a Grunt disappearing around a corner for the first time. I remember turning around and absolutely bolting in the opposite direction. As I was hiding in the corner I was thinking about how I had been playing the game for 45 minutes and that’s the first monster I’d seen. And it’s gone. I had been absolutely terrified the entire time and hadn’t actually done anything. That, to me, is extraordinary design. My appreciation of Amnesia went up when I started cracking open the maps in an editor and you realize just how few monsters are in the entire game. So many times you’re just imagining, and then you look and there’s practically nothing in there. That’s the brilliance of Amnesia’s design. 

Can you tell us how the enemy AI will be changing?

We made some changes because once you figure out how to play Amnesia, and figure out how the AI works, it’s less scary because you know how to get around creatures. We definitely had to make changes so that if players try to play the same way as if they were going up against Grunts, they’d find themselves in trouble pretty quickly. There are subtle things going on which means you won’t be able to sneak around them in the same way. Little things like what their vision is like, how fast they move, and how good they are at hunting and tracking you down. When you tweak even a few variables across the set you start getting a different personality. They may be more aggressive, perceptive, or less willing to give up on the chase as fast as the Grunts did. But the key thing is how do we protect the Amnesia experience and make sure it feels like an Amnesia game to people who’ve played a lot of it. They’re not going to be able to make assumptions about this world and how the creatures behave within it. 

Tell me about the setting for A Machine for Pigs

The Victorian era is great in terms of being a designer. The art team just loves it, because it’s invention central. You get a load of things you can do. You have all these types of tools and machines at your disposal. For me, the thing that’s really interesting about it is that period in history is a massive creative explosion. You’ve got inventions and innovation happening left, right, and center. Science is leaping forward. There’s huge social upheaval. You’ve also got this type of inverted progress – unpinning that is this incredibly dark social world where you’ve got massive deprivation, poverty, child slavery, trades in body parts, natives from developing countries, and it’s just a really awful time as well. Smashing those two things together, we have a period in history when the machine is king but people are being trodden under to enable that. It’s a powder keg of ideas for a horror game. It pushes forward a lot of ideas that are at the heart of The Dark Descent. That game asked, “What would you be prepared to do to save yourself?” Whereas A Machine for Pigs asks, “What would you be prepared to do to save humanity?” Which is what a lot of these Victorian inventors and entrepreneurs thought they were doing. They were trying to save the world by dragging it into the scientific age, but they were quite happy to fuel that by crushing people under their feet as they went. It’s that kind of question we’re looking at which follows the line of ideas from The Dark Descent but pushes them in a slightly different direction. It’s that central idea of figuring out what people are worth and what you’re prepared to do in order to achieve what you thought was right. 

Is the light-based lantern gameplay returning from Amnesia: The Dark Descent?

The central tension in Amnesia remains the same: If you’ve got the lantern on you can see, but creatures can see you. That’s going to remain at the center of this but with a slightly different twist. 

Any possible plans for a release on consoles?

At this stage it’s a little late in the day to be thinking about consoles at launch, but it’s certainly something we’ve thought about and are sort of gently examining. It won’t be at launch, but we and Frictional would very much like to get to consoles at some point.