The Chinese Room exploded into the indie scene with 2012′s Dear Esther, an exploration game with heavy themes and an obscure narrative. Since then, the team has begun work on a collaboration with Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games to make Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. We talked to writer Dan Pinchbeck about the process of creating a brand new game in the horror series.
Read our review of Dear Esther right here.
Dear Esther had elements of horror, but didn’t embrace being a straight “horror” game. How do you make the jump from Dear Esther to Amnesia?
It’s funny because I never thought of Dear Esther as being particularly horrible or scary – eerie I guess, but not scary. But we’d made another mod before Esther called Korsakovia which was pretty much straight down the line psychological horror and it’s kind of a genre I love, particularly when it gets fused with FPS gaming, so it wasn’t such a big leap. My writing is naturally pretty dark.
What did you learn from Dear Esther that you can bring over to the development of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs?
To trust in stillness and emptiness as being really powerful design tools, to not panic and think that you have to fill every opportunity with stimulus. Horror is really all about anticipation, and inference, and for those to work, you have to create space and time. The core experience design is giving the player just enough to start generating their own fear, then backing off and letting them do the work. You have to understand that there is literally nothing you can show or do that is going to be more frightening than what the player can come up with in their own heads. The challenge is seeding that, giving the player a really engaging architecture that they can’t escape and they are almost driven to populate with their own horror.
How has it been taking on the sequel to such a well-regarded indie hit as Amnesia?
Nerve-wracking – there’s a lot of love for Amnesia out there and you are aware that people are really watching this game. There’s a lot we can learn from the original, it’s a hell of template to work from, so that counterbalances that. But yeah, it’s scary.
How did it come about that you’d take over Frictional’s series? Did they approach you? You them?
It kind of fell together, we’d been talking for some time, and it just sort of came up. Frictional asked us, and we jumped at it really. This was before Esther launched, so we had no idea it was going to be such a hit, so being offered Amnesia as a follow-up, that was really amazing. Frictional put a lot of trust in us with their baby. I think we’ve taken good care of it.
Dear Esther had no fail state, no way to die. Are you changing that mentality for A Machine for Pigs? How has that affected your game design?
Oh yeah, it would have been daft to have a fail state in Esther, but that’s not a given, it’s not something we’d demand or hardware into our games. I think dying in games is fine if it’s handled right. I hate being handheld too much in games, I think it’s important to have stress response to situations and that’s the fundamental principle of fail states. So as Thomas has said before, the actually important thing is that players feel the presence of the fail state, as much as the actual fail state itself. So that’s something we’ve tried to get at the core of Amnesia. The fear of dying. So yes, you can die, and parts of the game are pretty tough. We were aware of the exploits players learned in Dark Descent and tried to close those loopholes as we found them.
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