It’s been a while since I played a full-on horror game. I’ve been prioritizing lighter and brighter experiences lately because the world is filled with enough horror. However, a new Amnesia game is hard to resist, so I decided to return to horror games with Amnesia: The Bunker.
The last game in the Amnesia series was 2020’s Amnesia: Rebirth. Set in the Algerian desert in 1937, you play Tasi Trianon, who is pregnant and has to deal with a strange illness consuming her and aliens. While it was a fine game, it wasn’t very Amnesia-y. It lacked suspense and genuine scares and had large swathes of bland emptiness.
The promise of a new game set in a WW1 bunker interested me. Bunkers are inherently creepy, with their claustrophobia-inducing corridors and endless labyrinths of corridors. Plenty of horror films have utilized this setting to great effect, and developers Frictional Games seem to have realized the potential for terror in the Amnesia world.
In the latest installment, you play as French soldier Henri, a lone survivor trapped inside his battalion’s bunker. After a harrowing tutorial of running through the trenches guided by a fellow soldier up top, Henri awakens alone with no idea what has occurred while he lies unconscious.
Amnesia: The Bunker’s Setting Is Perfect
There’s a room filled with still smoldering corpses, bloody streaks on the walls and floors, and gigantic holes in the walls of nearly every room, like mouseholes, but for a mouse that is approximately human-sized. This is an Amnesia game, so those holes probably have no bearing on anything at all, and it will be fine. Just ignore the scrabbling sounds and horrific guttural gurgles that come out of them now and again.
Once you get oriented, it’s time to start hunting for any information you can find that will give you an idea of what has happened to everyone. Journal entries and reports are littered around the bunker, and once you pick them up, they are stored in your handy journal. You can even organize them by date to get a linear timeline of events. You will also pick up a flashlight shortly after waking up. It doesn’t need batteries, which is great, but it does need to be cranked with a loud pull chain. Noise is your enemy in the bunker.
The game retains the controls players know from the original. You have a hand cursor and can interact with most objects in the environment. Pick things up, examine them, push them, and use them as obstacles. Check every drawer and open every door but do it fast, something is lurking in the walls, and you are its last source of food.
With limited inventory space forcing you to manage your scavenging, deciding what is critical you your survival is imperative. Scraps of cloth can be combined to make bandages, or they can be used with bottles to create petrol bombs – just remember that you will need a lighter. Bandages are a pretty essential thing, and you should try and keep at least one on you at all times. If you are injured, the creature can smell your blood and track you down.
Amnesia: The Bunker Brings Tension to Gameplay and Inventory Management
Luckily, you do have a Resident Evil-style save room. You can lock both doors into it, there are no monster holes, and you have an inventory storage box. You can also save in the room by turning on the overhead lamp. This is the only option you have for saving.
As well as worrying about the creature, you have to worry about the rats. These aren’t your regular scurrying beasties; they are more like London rats but somehow angrier. Oversized, mangey, and with glowing eyes, the rodents are not dissimilar to Brown Jenkins from H.P Lovecraft’s Dreams in The Witch House. Sure, they don’t have human faces, but they still want to munch all the flesh they can. If you’re lucky, you can jump over them, but you’ll ideally find alternatives to scare them off.
Of course, if you just had to find a way out, dodge monster rats, and avoid a flesh-rending subterranean terror, that would be too easy. There’s also the generator to worry about. The thing doesn’t like light, so you need to keep that generator running. That requires fuel. Fuel canisters will be littered around the bunker, but they aren’t infinite.
You have to manage fuel consumption and the length of your journeys out into the bunker. With the generator running, the creature will remain in the walls, more or less. You have a stopwatch that you can sync with the generator to track how long it will run. This is an interesting and helpful mechanic, but having the stopwatch takes up a precious spot in your inventory. Your inventory can be expanded by finding bags around the bunker but don’t rely on that too much.
Wrapping Up
There is a constant sense of dread and urgency as you try to move as quietly as possible through the complex while exploring every nook and cranny. There’s a perpetual threat that you can’t always see. Resources to ward them off are scarce, and finding everything you need to progress can be laborious and dangerous. If you don’t like backtracking in your games, Amnesia: The Bunker isn’t for you.
The combination of an ever-present threat, near-constant darkness, and an excellent sound design brings Amnesia: The Bunker back to the nail-biting roots of the franchise. While it doesn’t quite live up to the heady days of Amnesia: Dark Descent, it’s pretty damn close.
Amnesia: The Bunker is out now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and Steam.
