Fridge / Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Fridge Brilliance

• The manpigs behaving very childlike when they haven't noticed you already makes them far more complex enemies than the previous Amnesia monsters. Then we discover why the Machine was made, and we realize that this is because they're Mandus' picture of what should replace humans, who are inherently rotten in his point of view. They cannot grow up, therefore they cannot be soiled by adulthood as a human.
  • Adding onto this, the other reason this is so is because the Machine/Engineer itself verges into Psychopathic Manchild territory with its' immature glee and childish begging of "Daddy, please don't kill me." Which explains why it created the Manpigs as possessing such childish innocence. Of course, it also proves how Mandus's reasoning was fatally flawed from the start: just because something is innocent does not mean it is going to be good.
• Lilibeth, Mandus' wife, is only mentioned in his journals and is said to have died giving birth to their sons; no more elaboration on that. It's highly possible she could have died of Puerperal Fever. See, the disease was at its most common manifestation during the 1800-1900's, especially in England, and although it had a prevention for the resulting deaths during the 1800's (through ablution) by a man named Ignaz Semmelweis, his theory was shot down due to conflicting existing medical concepts by many doctors, and his method wasn't reused until the mid-1800's. (The disease finally had a cure in the early 1900's). My point is, while the cause of death reduced during this time, including 1899, in which the story is set, it still existed. So of course Mandus wouldn't question anything about it; it was still fairly common for women to die during childbirth, including his wife.
• The Engineer's plan to destroy the world so as to spare mankind the horrors of the 20th century is simply an extension of the same, warped logic that led Mundus himself to strangle both his children to spare them a death in the battle of the Somme. Both reflect a part of one of the game's wider themes, which is how even noble causes, when driven into by obsession and hatred and taken too far, can lead to horrific ends.

Fridge Horror

• In the second trailer for the game we have this dialogue:
  "There are surely not enough pigs in the whole of London to feed the appetite of such a machine."
  "That all rather depends, professor, on what one considers to be a pig."
  • You know that piece of concept art with the pig carcass hanging from a hook? Look at it again with the above words in mind. It's not a pig. It's a dismembered human torso.
    • Crossing over with Genius Bonus: human flesh apparently tastes like pork.
• Look at the above dialogue. Then look at how disturbing empty London is when at around that time it was home to nearly a fourth of the population of England. Nothing Is Scarier indeed.
• The official site also had this charming request while The Chinese Room was still working on the final build of the game:
  We want your fear. Record your screams, your whimpers, your blood curdling shrieks of terror and you could star in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
  We are on the hunt for the sounds of fear, panic, terror, anguish, torture and horrid, awful death to include in the soundtrack for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
  Send them as Wavs, Oggs or MP3s to [e-mail]
  We don’t care who does the screaming. We just want the fear.
  • Which all but confirms that this game is going to be exactly as brutal and nightmarish as its predecessor.
• And now some in-universe◊ letters◊ from the site are emerging, on first glance they are seemingly innocuous, but then you remember what game they are setting up, and they read rather differently. The first letter in particular as it details some seemingly benign arrangement between the pre-amnesiac protagonist and a local orphanage which includes lines such as "Please tell the kind sir, she said, that these were the finest sausages a child ever ate", and even more nightmarish in light of what has been implied so far about the game, Mandus, and the titular machine "I hope you find our Children full of promise. They will, I assure you sir make the most wonderful additions to your product line.
• Some of the screenshots recently released shows two exterior locations of the game in Victorian London with two barely visible and seemingly innocuous names such as Bucks row◊ and Hansbury street◊. A quick google search of them however reveal they have extremely sinister histories both due to the sheer poverty and deprivation that existed there at the time, and more nightmarishly, the fact they were the sites of the firsttwo Whitechapel murders. Murders which took place merely a decade or so before the game is set. Which thus means that the game is at least partially set in Jack the Ripper's old haunts and likely is connected to him in some way. Lovely.
• At the start of the game an adult voice with oddly childlike tone pleads: "Daddy, please don't kill me". While the player would first assume that it's the voice of Mandus's twins, it becomes apparent by the end of the game that it's the voice of his third "son", the Machine he tried to sabotage before losing his memory.
• That foul-smelling liquid used to start the truck and get it out of the way of the cemetary gates? It's biofuel made from human remains.
• Inside the estate of Mandus there is a large number of paintings. One of them is of a crazed woman holding a bloody knife and a bundled infant, while the leg of another infant is seen protruding from a cooking pot inside of the fireplace. Considering the revelation regarding what happened to Mandus' children, one wonders whether this was intentional foreshadowing.
  • Look more closely at the infant on the woman's lap, and consider the title of the painting; "Faim, Folie, Crime", or "Famine, Madness, Crime". There's a red spot on the baby's swaddling clothe where a leg would attach. It's not another infant; the woman cut off her baby's leg and is cooking it out of hunger and madness.
• The aftermath is even more horrific in hindsight. The Machine's mechanations didn't just murder thousands of people with the Pig invasion it ravaged the heart of Britain, one of the freest and most enlightened empires on earth and the standing global policeman, doing god knows what sort of damage. Considering that one of the overarching themes of the game is the horrors of the 20th century as it already was, what will happen if Britain cannot recover from the loss quickly enough to win World War I and prevent the rise of Imperial Germany, the Soviet Union, or another worse power to world domination? Mandus, did you just make the Twentieth Century even more of a nightmare than it was?
  • As Mandus's narration at the end says that: "[he] heard the city turning in its sleep" and a churchbell ringing, it sounds like the disturbance that the swarming manpigs caused was limited to a relatively small area in East End and never reached more prestigious parts of the city, and was most likely just labelled as a worker riot.
    • Even if that is true, the East End is *huge* and it's not altogether uncertain that the war might have caused a huge chunk of damage without waking the *entire* city up immediately, while the margin for victory in World War I was still narrow enough that gutting a part of the End might have changed things in wild and unpredictable ways. Possible Unreliable Narrator and the issue about whether the nature of Vitae and the orbs make Mandus hear or see something inaccurate, it's hard to mistake mutant man-pigs for anything but mutant man-pigs, especially since riots in London were not common and nowhere near as violent and murderous as the invasion.
• The Machine's cries of "more pig" seem incredibly Narm-ish at first... until you remember all the times that humans have been referred to as pigs, especially by pre-amnesiac Mandus.