Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs Horror beneath the house

You wake in a grand Victorian mansion with no memory of how you got there. The floor trembles. Somewhere below, an engine is running, and a phone call tells you your children are in danger. So begins a descent: through the house, into the flooded cellars, down into the machine itself.

The story unfolds as you go, through diary pages, phonograph recordings and Mandus's own fractured recollections, including visions of a disastrous expedition to Mexico. Nothing here is told kindly. It is a dark, strange and often disturbing tale about what a man will justify in the name of progress, and it stays with you long after the credits.

This is an industrial nightmare rather than a gothic one: endless factory floors, smoking chimneys, furnaces, gears and grimy streets, all lit like the worst museum of the industrial revolution imaginable. The dread comes less from what chases you than from what the machine turns out to be for.

Sound carries most of it. Jessica Curry's soundtrack is genuinely beautiful, and it sits against the pounding of machinery and sudden screeches to keep you on edge throughout. The pig-like creatures you meet are hideous, and the game is at its most frightening when you hear one before you see it. Compared to The Dark Descent, the survival systems are gone: no inventory, no lantern fuel, no sanity meter. What remains is a slower, more story-driven kind of fear, and a shorter, more linear game. Come for the atmosphere and the plot more than the mechanics.