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The Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilizations ran upon the idea that sacrifice makes the world go round: by offering up the vital energy of the world, they were both following the gods’ example and giving the sun the momentum required to keep rising. Our world turns because of the sacrifice of others

During the descent, the player finds little models of Mesoamerican step pyramids scattered throughout the factory like an artist’s signature, and you cannot understand the precise horror A Machine for Pigs presents without knowing why they are present. The game itself takes place on New Year’s Eve, 1899, when an amnesiac Mandus is told to enter the machine in order to rescue his children.

After discovering more unconventional ways of cutting costs (i.e., magic), Mandus becomes consumed with creating a grand machine that will cure the world of its inherent suffering. Its backstory reinforces this point: a well-meaning industrialist, Oswald Mandus, spends the bulk of his fortune on livable wages and safe factories, only to find that his prices are no longer competitive, his profit margins are non-existent, and he is in danger of losing everything. Īt first blush, the videogame relies upon the dehumanization inherent to industrialization as a foundation for its horror. And yet the drama of grisly sacrifice finds an interesting thematic niche in 2013’s Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Just as the offering was being flayed at the festival of Xipe Totec, so too did the audience peel off and offer husks of corn as a symbolic parallel.

This connotation is, to a certain extent, unfair: the purpose behind these sacrifices was not founded in naked cruelty, and they were, often enough, more symbolic than literal. The image of the reluctant offering climbing the stone steps of the pyramids at Tenochtitlan only to have their chest cut open and their beating heart plucked out is repulsive to both the value we place in human life and our sense of decorum. We are familiar with Aztec myth only insofar as it is a byword for cruelty and human sacrifice. “When, for instance, a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the fact out and making his family unhappy.”