20 Best Video Game Stories Ever

Frankly Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs belongs this high just for being one of, if not the darkest story in gaming history. At least the canonical ending of Silent Hill 2 has James end in a place of genuine healing and the little girl getting out relatively okay, so at least some good came of what happened. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs though? Yeah, no.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is about a man named Mandus, who wakes up in his house with no memory of the past several years. All he knows is that his two young sons are in danger, and a strange voice on the phone telling him that he needs to turn on this great machine resting beneath his mansion in order to save them. As he descends into the machine, Mandus learns terrible truth after terrible truth, most of which are obvious to the player, but in the context of the game, the obviousness of the twists actually make them worse in a way.

Machine For Pigs has NOTHING good to say about the human condition. It is bleak as all hell, but its bleakness is beautiful, in its way, owing mostly to the music by Jessica Curry and the brilliant writing, particularly the final monologue that sums up everything the game has to say about the human race, the world at large, and the futility of fighting against the march of time, no matter how steep the cliff it may be marching toward is.