Games of 2013: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

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Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs doesn't make a whole lot of sense and that's fine. 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". 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. 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. That it's so hard to grasp only adds to its charm.
Where it seems most games these days are trying to emulate movies, Pigs is more like a poem or a song. The words, visuals, and sounds add flavour without providing a proper concrete narrative blueprint from which to navigate. It's a bit like the first time you listened to Kid A. 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. 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).
Yet it's still an outrageously disquieting game, because the most striking aspects of Pigs are the ones not shown but rather implied. 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. 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:
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