Amnesia: The Bunker PC Review

I bet a lot of horror video game fans can remember when Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released back in 2010 on PC. It was met with a barrage of YouTubers screaming ridiculously at how scary the game was. Was this overblown hype or was Amnesia: The Dark Descent actually scary? The latter was the answer after I braved through the game’s 1800s medieval castle dealing with that monstrosity that inhabitant that place. One of my favourite horror games is Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly, a title that I regard as one of the best horror games out there, but since Amnesia: The Dark Descent arrived on the scene, I was happy to give that game the award as one of the best horror games to grace the video game medium. It genuinely created a sense of dread, an unnerving atmosphere that sucked you in and did not let you go until the game was completed. Frictional Games are at it again, trying to scare the living crap out of players as they release the fourth entry, the third created by them, Amnesia game with Amnesia: The Bunker, taking the concepts from older titles and building on that to give players an even more unnerving sense of dread and tension.

Amnesia: The Bunker brings us to the dreadfulness of World War 1 where the player is put into the boots of French soldier, Henri Clement. The game sets us up with Henri in trench warfare who is being attacked by the enemy. Later his friend goes missing and is found to be in a crater. Willing to put his life on the line, Henri grabs his friend and gets him out to safety, only to be hit by a close mortar shell, causing Henri to lose consciousness. Henri later wakes up inside a bunker with no relocation of how he got there. His friend is not around, only an injured person in another room who has a message for Henri. To get out of the bunker, the dynamite and fuse need to be found to blow open the sealed exit that was caved in by previous soldiers to stop whatever is in from escaping. The soldier pleads to Henri to put him out of his misery by handing over a gun and to go grab the bullets in the room close by and shoot him to end his life. His wish is not granted, as soon as the player returns with the ammo, a monster’s arm comes through the wall and grabs the poor guy away, leaving the player to understand why he wanted to end his life so badly.

It seems like a simple objective on paper; find the dynamite and fuse, get to the exit and blow it open, but the bunker, and what inhabits it, are what make this a difficult and horrifying time. The first biggest change to the formula compared to the previous iterations is this bunker environment and its more open approach to exploration. It might seem weird using the word open and bunker, as the bunker is such a claustrophobic, sealed location, more so when a deadly creature that can remove you from existence in a few seconds is roaming around. What I mean is that the approach to the gameplay is done in a freer-flowing way. The player has an objective, to get those key items, but doing this requires doing other things to get to the end goal, such as finding a keycode for a locker that holds a wrench to open a new section. But unlike before, the bunker is one set location, one set size. Yes, there are areas that are sealed by means of finding items to bypass them. The game’s design is that you are exploring, backtracking and pushing further out on each new adventure out from the administration room to reach a new location that is further away from the safety of that administration room. I often found I had to stick on my big boy pants and brave what unexpectedness was going to appear during my first discovery of a new area and the rooms within it.

The setting of the bunker is as dreary and dark as one would expect from something based underground. The location is split into a few key areas, such as the prison or the living quarters where soldiers once lived before either dying or escaping from the monstrosity. Hidden amongst this is The Beast, no, not Brock Lesnar, but some enlarged four-legged monster that patrols around the bunker hunting out any humans. Not much is known about the beast in the beginning, as the game’s story is mainly kept to discovering pictures and notes left by soldiers, and since Henri is pretty much on his own for most of the adventure, the history of the bunker is fed through these notes rather than fancy big cutscenes. It builds up the discovery of what is going on in the game, as the player learns as time goes on in a similar pattern to how the soldiers did as things began to become weird within the bunker and those soldiers scribbled down notes of the happenings.

The Beast is the game’s new monster, the centrepiece of the threat. This monster wonders around the bunker and is attracted to sounds, but is afraid of bright light sources, such as the ones that hang in most areas of the game. That is all fine and dandy, but the issue is that those lights require a generator, which requires fuel to run. Fuel canisters and various other items can be found around the bunker, but the player has limited capacity, six at first, but more can be unlocked by finding small pouches to increase capacity by one. Still, there is never enough space to carry everything, so it becomes a decision to grab what is needed and put away items in the administration’s chest to collect later. Since the administration is the centre haven of the game, you will always find yourself coming here, because this is where the generator is located to load in the fuel, but also where the save point is situated in the game, with all saving done manually. This can be frustrating at times, because of how careful players can be when exploring new locations, death can mean losing 20 minutes of gameplay because of doing something silly that triggers a noise and the impending doom from the Beast if unable to manage to hide from it. Although, the counter to that is that now you know what to do, getting back to that point should be much quicker if the patience is there to not attract the monster again.

Fuelling the generator is like using a defibrillator on a heart, it brings the bunker back to life, offering protection from the Beast as you walk down its many darkness-filled passages. The generator chews through fuel, and with fuel hidden around in limited quantities, it becomes a strategy for when to use the fuel for added protection when heading into dangerous areas. Many corridors offer specs of light, be it from fires or emergency lighting, but these are not enough to offer more vision than a few steps ahead and will certainly not keep the Beast away. To help visibility, there is access to a flashlight, but due to the time period, these were hand-cranked with a pull cord to charge up the light for a few seconds. The problem with doing this is that it makes a loud noise as the motor spins and charges, which can alert the Beast. Typical, that the one thing that offers some sense of visibility will also alert the danger, and since this is not a strong enough source of light, it is impossible to protect yourself with it against the Beast. The first few uses of the flashlight are unbelievably tense, because of the unknown reaction it is going to cause with its noise. If the bunker starts shaking and dust falls off the roof, you know the monster is travelling through the passages to come to find the source of that blasted flashlight spinner.

This design of travelling from the safety of the admin room and venturing out into the ‘level’ makes me think of a Metroidvania, but not quite full of puzzles and secrets. Although there are puzzles to solve, there is nothing complex that will get people stumped, as it’s more searching for items, finding solutions to unlock things in the environment or using switches to perform actions in rooms. There is some randomness to the design, such as the locker and door codes are 4-digit randomly generated, so that people cannot simply go look up the codes to bypass a chunk of the game. Most items are randomly placed, and traps, such as gas grenades or explosives on tripwires, are random as well. The latter is evil because the darkness can make it easy to trigger these without noticing, causing the noise to alert the Beast. Also, those little bastard rats like to perform suicide missions and run into these, as if they are working for the Beast to alert him. Rats are truly gits, as they will also bite you if you go near them unless you are carrying meat that you can throw to lure them away from dead bodies, most of which will be holding a dog tag with a code on for one of the many lockers to gain extra items. This randomness does mean that while overall objectives are the same, each playthrough can be slightly different, and due to the free roaming of the Beast, it means that interactions with the monster can also be varied on each playthrough making this a less predictable experience than anything Amnesia has offered previously.

This leads us to the last addition to the Amnesia series, the ability to have a gun. The trailers made this seem like it was a single bullet use for the entire game, which is not exactly the case. Ammo is scarce, very scarce in fact, I think I came around 7-8 bullets throughout the game, although having ammo is not a requirement, it is just the outcome that causes the most noise and distraction. Other items can be used as well, such as bottles of fuel to create Molotov cocktails, if you manage to get the lighter, and also grenades, which can do great damage. The gun does harm the Beast, as it puts him in a stun motion for a short time. Fire and explosives are the most helpful as it causes the Beast to scamper off and leave you alone for a short amount of time.

There are a ton of positives for this new direction but like with anything that has some elements of randomness, things can go a bit wrong. The Beast is not the cleverest of foes in video games. It can often come right close to your position and not sense you, but then other times it will seemingly catch a piece of your body and rush right at you. It can also get stuck on objects, or in my case, stuck running into one of its holes, which left me with an amusing scene as I stared at the beast with no fear as it tried to run through a wall. Tell you what, it would have totally shit me up if it suddenly turned and went for me. It is something that throws the player out of the otherwise incredibly atmospheric setting, as this is one of the tensest and most stressful horror games you will play in 2023, but those little niggles take down the presentation a notch. There is also a random hitch when loading between areas where the game freezes while loading…Bizarre to see this in 2023, as this is something I remember seeing back with the original Half-Life. I am surprised with the speed of SSDs and CPUs that this is still a thing that happens. Maybe it is something to do with their own custom engine they are using.

This new design for Amnesia with Amnesia: The Bunker allows the series to progress forward from its more linear experiences in the past. While it might no longer be that unexpected shocking horror game that popped up out of nowhere, which the first title did, be warned, Amnesia: The Bunker comes with many more ways to keep the friction and tension high between the player and the game. The setting and its use of the generator and how powerful the light is in the game in keeping the player safe, but also enabling visibility, is the game’s biggest strength. Being left in the dark with just a pully flashlight and the amazing audio that builds the setting with such atmospheric ambient, while hearing the monster grunting around a few faces away from your hiding spot, is such a haunting experience. This is a game that people should stomach to experience how horror games can make you feel when set in an isolated dark environment with minimum ammo and a huge monster tracking you down. A truly dreadful experience, in a positive sense, which is something only horror games can deliver.