Alleys and gutters running freely with the careless spill of their conjoinings. "Men and women upon all fours, rutting carelessly, ejaculating their filthy little missives into the streets. Normally the old adage is to "show, not tell", but it's hard to argue with developer The Chinese Room when Pinchbeck describes poor people fornicating as such: While the ghostly streets of 1899 London are largely left vacant, we're able to understand protagonist Oswald Mandus' revulsion to society by his scrawls strewn about town. Yet it's still an outrageously disquieting game, because the most striking aspects of Pigs are the ones not shown but rather implied. Pigs likewise deftly avoids the usual clichés with surprisingly little gore or on-screen violence, its action sequences are slim to nil, and the monsters are portrayed sympathetically as often as malevolent (though I'll confess that the spooky spectral children were a tad trite). It's never quite clear what Thom Yorke is yammering on about in Radiohead's seminal album, and most of the songs lack a chorus and are comprised of peculiar discordant sounds, but the overall ambiance is bewilderingly haunting while avoiding the usual melancholy dirges one typically pulls from to achieve the same effect. It's a bit like the first time you listened to Kid A. The words, visuals, and sounds add flavour without providing a proper concrete narrative blueprint from which to navigate. Where it seems most games these days are trying to emulate movies, Pigs is more like a poem or a song. That it's so hard to grasp only adds to its charm. Instead of focusing on a pat little tale, it creates an atmosphere of dread so potent that the conventional criteria of what we look for in a game - things like puzzles, plot, win/lose conditions - are thrown completely out the window in favour of an abstract, wondrous experience that hits notes other games simply don't. Pigs, as I'll call it for short, hangs its remarkable artistic achievements (Dan Pinchbeck's flowery, rotten prose Jessica Curry's screeching, shrapnel bomb of a score Sindre Grønvoll's's Grand Guignol labyrinthine environments) around the most threadbare of plots. I don't think it's meant to when even its creator admits that he has "two or three fairly contradictory interpretations of what might be going on at the end of Pigs at the same time".
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