Frictional Games’s Amnesia: The Bunker centers around a World War II soldier who awakens in an underground shelter with, you guessed it, amnesia. What the title doesn’t convey is just how big of a departure the game is from the other entries in the Amnesia series, including 2010’s The Dark Descent, one of the best horror games of all time.
For one, the linearity of the game’s predecessors is gone, replaced by a semi-open world built around a central safe room. Multiple paths snake away from that hub into the depths of the bunker, and you may travel them as you wish, searching for the demolition tools to blast open an exit. No matter where you travel, though, you’ll find large holes in the walls from which the single mutant that stalks your progress throughout the game could emerge.
The player is also no longer defenseless in the face of such a violent, twisted monstrosity. Rather than only being able to run or hide from it, you can fend off the creature with a revolver or a grenade that you carry within your limited inventory arsenal. But since they never outright kill the creature, such measures may leave you feeling as if you’ve wasted precious resources that might have been put to more permanent use elsewhere in the bunker. For one, a bullet could be used to shoot open a padlock, and a grenade could blow apart a locked wooden door.
The Bunker is thus an intense game of resource management, of making constant journeys away from the safe room in hopes of finding more useful items without expending too many of the items you already have. You search for things like bandages, tools, and especially gasoline because the lights only run as long as you’ve poured gasoline into the safe room’s generator. After a while, you might even take chances on leaving behind important items: The stopwatch is certainly useful for letting you know when the generator will give out, but the inventory slot that it occupies might be better left empty just in case you need the extra space.
After all, the resources are distributed sparingly enough so that you never seem to have enough bullets or gas cans to get comfortable. The failure to find something useful on a run can place you in a tough position, so even if you know there’s not a lot of time left until a blackout, you’re often pushing yourself to find something, anything, only to then make the trek back in the dark, aided only by a crank-operated light that makes more than enough noise for the creature to notice. The most blistering, heart-in-mouth moments of suspense come when you’ve found some resource cache or some critical item and become painfully aware of what it will mean to lose progress by running afoul of the creature, wasting crucial moments waiting for its silhouette in the distance to go away or for it to slink back in its hole while you cower under a table.
Perhaps the game’s biggest departure from its predecessors is the absence of a fear/sanity system, which discouraged you from standing too long in the dark or staring too much at horrific sights like the monsters after your blood. In The Bunker, the need to avoid the darkness is more practical: Tripwires attached to flares and grenades are tougher to spot without light, and the bunker’s layout is just confusing enough to discourage attempts to navigate it by muscle memory. Staring at the monster carries no ill effects either, but getting a clear look at the thing tends to mean it’s close enough to take a swipe at you with its enormous claws.
The experience is a far cry from the first Amnesia, which went so far as to lie about how its stealth worked, with tutorial text claiming that staring at the monster will give away your position. It wasn’t true in a technical sense, but it did further incentivize players to avert their eyes. The Bunker trumpets a claim, via a loading screen, that “if you think something might be possible to do, it probably is,” though it proves to be dubious. The game is nudging the player to experiment with the available tools, but in practice, progress through the bunker rarely involves discovering some new interaction so much as locating tools and items that act like glorified keys.
Experimenting will more often reveal methods that do not work rather than validating the loading screen’s impossibly lofty claim to player freedom. Further, the resource scarcity that drives the game is hardly conducive to experimentation, doing more to keep you strictly on the path of least resistance. What motive is there to waste a precious gas can on some hare-brained scheme when you know for sure that it will work just fine in the generator? Certainly the more restrictive means of progression in The Bunker has its own pleasures even within a more open framework, but the game insists on calling a shot that it has no hope of making.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Evolve PR.
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