The Engineer (character)

"They weren't looking forward to visitors, were they?"

This article contains spoilers for Amnesia: The Bunker. Proceed with caution.

"A cleansing fire always burns little Mandus, but it purifies and it makes anew."

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A possible representation of the Engineer

The Engineer is the main antagonist from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. He is the core of The Machine that controls the Manpigs and creates them from humans and animals.

Speculation

The Engineer, also the Machine itself, is part of the damaged soul of Oswald Mandus. He is the sentience behind the Machine that promised Oswald that, together, they would be able to prevent the intense period of human suffering to come in the 20th century.

The Engineer embodies the bitterness, the hatred, and the misanthropic feelings towards humans in Oswald's heart. However, he appears to also be constructed of the twisted, selfish love the Oswald had for his children -- shown by his reasoning under the madness that it was better for his children to die than to live on to eventually suffer a painful death later.

Using the machine to process Aztec-style human sacrifices on an industrial scale, the Engineer (the Machine) hoped to achieve godhood in order to prevent the coming wars of the 20th century. Despite these seemingly good intentions, he is incredibly cruel and twisted, and seems to hold a contempt for mankind's inability to care for itself displayed in the same way a parent would be disappointed in a child. In its final moments, the Engineer pleads for Oswald to allow it to finish the task it was constructed for -- to rid humans of their "painful, stupid, pointless lives" after it had seen the future and experienced the terrible events to come for so many humans.

As Oswald is destroying the final components of the machine, there is a large metal container connected to various pipes and lights with what appears to be a shriveled, adult male inside it, implied to be the physical embodiment of The Engineer.

It is worth noting that the Engineer tells Oswald in the final sequence of the game that "we are one, our souls are entangled!" This implies that they are the same person, while being separate entities at the same time. At earlier points in the game, the Engineer recounts how he was placed "on the mantelpiece", which is a reference to the March 15th, 1899 document that reads "And then we came to London and I set it upon the mantelpiece" near the end. This implies he came from the Orb and fused with the hateful side of Oswald's broken soul. It could mean the spirit of the Orb or even the Shadow -- neither is confirmed.