Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs creator Dan Pinchbeck has revealed that the changes made to the series template between the first and second game resulted in hate mail that – he says – would make the horror game “look like Sesame Street.”

Speaking with GI.biz, Pinchbeck explained that he felt the game’s teaser images – which showed a pig nailed to a cross – would garner a negative reaction, but in the end mechanical changes to the Amnesia format saw the studio hit by hate mail. Fans were dismayed over several changes, such as not being able to throw objects around rooms, the lack of an insanity meter and more.

“I thought what we sort of had a screenshots going out, of a pig nailed to a cross, that we were likely to get a couple of phone calls,” Pinchbeck recalled, “but amazingly people just went yeah, whatever.”

On the hate over the game’s changes he added, “We got some really… the worst kind of hate mail we’ve ever got as a studio, some really very, very nasty stuff. That made the actual content of Pigs look like Sesame Street really.”

“The stuff I found most difficult was the idea that people wouldn’t even kind of engage with the ideas or the content of the game because they seem so incensed by the way in which it was packaged,” he went on. “In terms of going, ‘I just don’t like the way in which this… this kind of game play is structured on quite a mechanical level.’ And that’s kind of… I still, I struggle a little bit with that in terms of understanding it.”

What’s your view on the changes between Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs? Let us know below.