On Finishing What You Start: Amnesia: The Bunker Review
Amnesia: The Bunker by Frictional Games, all images are by me
I have a kind of photographic memory when it comes to entertainment I enjoy. I can pick up a book I haven’t touched in five years, and within a few pages, be caught up on the plot. Character names might be a bit spotty, but that’s not much different than my interactions with real life humans. For better and worse, I’ve developed the same habit when playing video games. If something doesn’t immediately grab me, it doesn’t take much to give myself permission to step away.
In recent years, I’ve encountered a few problems with this strategy. Titles rotating in and out of their respective subscription services means I no longer have five years to organically work my way through that RPG I started on a whim to combat depression on a bad Friday night. The other issue is, unlike that TV show you abandoned in the middle of the third season, video games can’t be absorbed passively. They have pesky things like mechanics and controls (I recently jumped back into The Callisto Protocol and had to actually Google how to open the inventory). I’ve played enough games that I’m confident I can figure everything out, eventually. But with my policy of always moving forward in an effort to conquer a bottomless backlog (a losing battle if there ever was one), restarting is out of the question. The fact that the Amnesia series, the subject of today’s review, is also quite scary and taking a few practice deaths to get my bearings is a traumatizing prospect. I downloaded Amnesia: The Bunker soon after its release in 2023, but put it back down after its slow opening.
Last year, I burned through Amnesia: Rebirth, and just like that, I was reacquainted with the series' somewhat unwieldy controls (the controls are appropriate for what the series does, but most games don’t play this way).
I’d found my window–I’d opened a narrow trapdoor to descend into The Bunker one last time.
It felt like now or never.
The Bunker takes place in the trenches of World War I. After an opening that’s meant to shellshock the player, we leave the artillery above ground, muted and far away. Henri, our nearly silent protagonist, is isolated and being stalked by something in the walls–something with sharp fangs and sharper claws. However, unlike Amnesias of the past, you’re not completely defenseless. Henri is equipped with a revolver (which, in true survival horror fashion, needs to be reloaded one round at a time). Firing a slug into the creature’s face won’t kill him, but he’ll know he’s been in a fight…
…and after he’s finished shaking it off, he’ll immediately forget he was in a fight and reappear moments later. Fans expressed concerns during prerelease that the addition of firearms would turn a series that is meant to be a slow burn dread factory into a twitch shooter. I can confirm that isn’t the case. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re overwhelmed enough that you feel the need to shoot your way out, you’re probably already dead.
And who are we kidding? You don’t have the bullets to pull that off, anyway.
The monster isn’t the only constant source of anxiety. The real horror lurking just out of sight is resource management. The central safe room houses a generator in its sub-basement and keeping it topped off with the fuel cans scattered across the map is almost mandatory for your survival. If you want to continue to see more than three feet in front of your face, this is the best method (it also frees up precious inventory slots–which fill up fast even if you aren’t lugging around a bouquet of torches). Don’t forget about your health! After one misadventure that involved me getting mauled, I accidentally leaked a perfect trail of blood back into the main tunnel. This quickly led a pack of cinder block sized rats to take up residence and they were hungry. A good portion of the rest of my journey was spent tiptoeing (more like bobbing, weaving, and circle strafing) around the rats.
In conclusion, use bandages.
Your attempts at escape will play out in a series of runs. You choose a wing of the bunker to investigate, hopefully find a key or a code or flip a switch, then retreat back to the comforting glow of the save lantern to figure out your next step. If at any point while you’re out that generator you’ve been feeding gulps down the last of its fumes, you’ll be forced to find your way back by flashlight (it’s powered by violent tugs on a rip-cord, which, of course, attracts the monster like everything louder than your own heavy breathing). It’s as harrowing as it sounds. In my Amnesia: Rebirth review from last year (which can be found under the blog tab at nohappyendings.net) I mentioned that I appreciated the different flavors of darkness–they added an extra layer of personality to the dusty ruins and alien hallways. The darkness here comes in one variety: suffocating.
This is, at its core, a game about planning and gathering information. Which rooms have useful items and which are booby-trapped? You might know the location of stashed ammo and supplies, but is it worth the risk to take a detour to retrieve them? Where was that chain that needed cut–that vent that needed unscrewed? How much light do you have left? Your starting kit includes a watch that you can sync to your remaining generator power–but I’m a crafty soldier and opted to use my Fitbit, instead.
In the spirit of utilizing my neglected Fitbit, The Bunker is also a lightweight immersive sim. You’re told in the opening that there are multiple ways to tackle most obstacles. For me, this usually translated to blowing locked doors open with grenades (this is how I chose to exclusively use grenades during my playthrough). Then I could hide until the creature got bored and return to pick through the stone chips and splinters at my leisure.
Because of this run structure, how deliberate and repetitive it is eventually erodes all the sharp edges off the horror. It didn’t take long for me to accept that I could trial and error my way into finding the necessary codes, then simply die and restart back at the lantern. That aforementioned dread is always there, but by my second hour of playtime, I was no longer scared because I’d seen it all before (in some cases, four or five times). Hearing the monster emerge from its burrow and begin searching for me didn’t make me hold my breath–it made me sigh.
Here we go again.
If there’s ever been an argument for permadeath making a game better, this is the case study.
After your initial escape, some item locations and codes are randomized in future runs. Meaning, if this loop clicks with you (and I feel speedrunning Resident Evil for better letter grades and rocket launchers has conditioned the horror community to fall in love with exactly this type of thing), the game has near endless replayability. There are also technically multiple endings, but without spoiling anything, I can’t stress enough that they’re not the draw here and you shouldn’t crawl back in hoping to come away with new revelations. Even in darkness as black as pitch, what you see is what you get.
If you’re the type of player that needs just a hint of stress to feel alive, I’d recommend Amnesia: The Bunker. My playthrough came in at 4 hours and 31 minutes (and 38 deaths), so even if you bounce off its systems like a brick hurled at a door that’s a little bit too sturdy, you won’t be sacrificing more than a weekend.
Accept that failure is part of the process–and look out for rats.
76/100