Frictional's latest horror game Amnesia: The Bunker is out today, and it is really good. Almost unexpectedly so, to some extent: Frictional makes brilliant horror games but the Amnesia formula is well over a decade old now (and much older than that, if you count the Penumbra series) and it'd be fair to expect it to be a little stale by this point. But no: We called it "an essential horror game and an inspired next step for the series" in our 93% review.
To celebrate the release of The Bunker, GOG is making one of the older games in the series, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, free until June 9. It's a bit of an oddity in the Amnesia pantheon: The GOG store page describes A Machine for Pigs as "the darkest, most horrific tale ever told in a videogame," but in reality it's easily the least-frightening game in the series. It's "cerebral and spooky," as we said in our glowing 2013 review, but the balls-out terror of The Dark Descent and Rebirth isn't there: Instead of shrieking, murderous grotesqueries lurking in dark corners, it's more of an observational, creeping horror that unfolds through the narrative.
