I'm gonna start this off with some advice. Go to maintenance first. Ignore what the notes say about getting the code to arsenal and going into the Roman tunnels. Maintenance has an item that will make it much easier to progress, and a locker code for an item that will open up a lot of doors, no pun intended. Also, don't be afraid to run the generator. The game gives you a lot of fuel, and you should use it. It's a mechanic that the game is designed around. Also, remember you can break down doors with bricks.

Anyway...

I really enjoyed the first game in the Amnesia series, The Dark Descent, but I haven't played the other two in the series, despite owning them. The Dark Descent I found to be thrilling, but it also had a very engaging story. Daniel was an interesting protagonist, and every time we'd find a note that he wrote before erasing his memory, I understood more and more why he chose to do that. "The Dark Descent" didn't just refer to the literal descent into Castle Brennenburg, I think. That game was a big hit and seemed to spawn a new sub-genre of "horror" games as opposed to "survival horror." "Horror" games are games where running and hiding are the main ways of dealing with threats, and solving puzzles is the main gameplay crux.

With The Bunker it seems Frictional has made a survival horror game this time around, with a massive emphasis on survival. Managing resources is a huge part of the game, and you actually get a gun, which, the few times I actually used it, was invaluable. This adds an interesting balancing act to how the various resources can be used in the game. Almost every item that you find can have multiple uses. Bullets from the revolver can frighten the monster away, but they can also be used to shoot padlocks off doors. Grenades can also be used defensively, but you can also use them to open stubborn locked doors. Fuel is essential to run the generator, but making Molotov cocktails can remove some incredibly annoying obstacles.

This is one of the most interesting parts of the game. The balancing act. The flashlight you get is also indicative of this, unlimited light, at the cost of it being as loud as lawnmower when you wind it up.

This brings us to the part of the game that led me to restart it four times. You will spend so much time scraping and scrounging in the dark that it starts to feel unfair. You'll constantly encounter things that you have no chance of dealing with because you haven't found a specific item. I know I felt very frustrated at times. There was a point where everything kind of started to fall into place, though. After getting a certain item, the game seemed like it just became a straight shot. The monster was more of an annoyance once I knew what I was doing.

As far as how scary this game is, I think it's mixed. Hiding from the monster as it stalks around is great fun, and you'll certainly be afraid of getting killed, but I think after the 20th time, the thing you'll be most afraid of is losing the last 30 minutes of progress you made. The Roman Tunnels section of the game is amazing, though. Incredibly unsettling, and honestly, the highlight for me in terms of horror.

I look forward to Frictional's next installment.

Okay, so first off, I'm not sure why I was surprised to have enjoyed this game so much, but I can speculate. I, like many others, really enjoyed the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent when it first came out. For all its spookiness, jumpscares, and stumbling around in the dark while fucked up monsters are lurking around every corner, it also has a compelling narrative and puzzle gameplay that interweaves with the horror elements well. And beyond that, it was simply aiming at a new kind of horror game that wasn't really a thing at the time. Now, for better or for worse, The Dark Descent was instrumental in spawning the Walking Sim Horror genre, or as I often call it, Haunted House Sim. These are narrative horror games where you don't really get to fight and instead need to flee or sneak past the horrors that confront you while uncovering a (hopefully) interesting story. Gameplay is usually light and/or simple with some stealth segments interspersed with puzzle-solving. On the downside, this concept has since been done into the ground and most Haunted House Sims these days I expect to never rise above 4 stars, even if they're great at what they're doing. That said, it's easy to forget that despite being one of the biggest originators of the genre, The Dark Descent still did it so much better than the many many games that took inspiration from it. And I should know this all the more after playing Amnesia: Rebirth, a game I had low expectations for but ended up loving with its greater focus on cinematic narrative and character. I shouldn't have been surprised to like Rebirth so much, but I was, and I made the same mistake with The Bunker which takes a lot of Amnesia's core concept and once more iterates and innovates in ways that its multitude of originators have failed to, in my experience.

The first most noticeable difference in this entry is that while I personally cringe when I hear this hide and seek series labeled "Survival Horror," this game actually earns the title. While you're still mostly defenseless, being equipped with guns, grenades, and a generator that keeps the monster at bay with the lights of the bunker are huge helps that prevent this from being the Haunted Houses I'm so familiar with (and tired of) elsewhere. This is all the more so because you are constantly having to manage resources. Despite the availability of a gun, this is in no means a shooter and there are very very few bullets in the game. The gun can be used as a tool and as a last ditch effort to (maybe) ward off the monster if you get cornered. Going in guns blazing will exhaust your supply of ammunition in a matter of seconds and get you nowhere. Instead, you have to manage other tools like fuel for the generator and grenades to make your exploration a little safer while achieving that sweet tension inherent in seeing the flickering lights and knowing your relative safety in the bunker is about to go away. One of your other primary tools is a wind-up flashlight that makes a ton of noise, but provides vital light, especially when your generator is out of fuel. This flashlight mechanic is a great tie to the typical risk-reward that's so iconic in Survival Horror.

I think the tension of this Survival Horror gameplay adds so much to the Amnesia formula. The resources you get make sense for the WW1 setting in a spooky bunker, but they also throw in the joy of that sweet relief when you come on a cache of supplies that's familiar to any veteran of the genre. For example, early in the game you find a room with an array of lockers corresponding to your (likely fallen) fellow soldiers stationed at the bunker. Each locker contains a number of goodies, some of them key items you'll need to progress the game and others with useful supplies like grenades, bullets, and generator fuel. The combination to each is found on the corresponding soldier's dog tags, which you can retrieve from their corpses throughout the bunker. This was a morbid but rewarding gameplay loop that adds an ambivalence to being excited...about finding the corpses of people you once fought alongside.

The last major difference is that the game is a lot more "sandbox" in layout than the previous games with their more or less linear progression. You start the game in a tutorial stretch of WW1-style trenches, but once you quickly reach the bunker, that's where you'll be pretty much till the end of the game. While several sections are closed off at first, you are free to complete the various tasks needed to escape in the order you'd like with prior areas being available if you'd like to search them more thoroughly later. This is yet another element I didn't expect to work so well, but I found that the various maps and tasks in different parts of the bunker made the setting so much more real and familiar to me in a way I wouldn't expect from a setting that is mostly dark concrete walls. This also plays well into the game's central design philosophy of having multiple solutions to the game's several puzzles and progression requirements. While I don't personally feel inclined to replay The Bunker, you could have different playthroughs go completely differently depending on how you approach things.

I've seen the game criticized for being too short at just about 4-5 hours (4.3 for me according to Steam). Compared to The Dark Descent and Rebirth, which each about doubled that estimate, this game definitely stands out, feeling more like a side story than a full experience. However personally, even though I liked both of those games, one of my favorite things about The Bunker and Machine for Pigs (a sort of unofficial official Amnesia game of a similar length) is how they don't overstay their welcome. I think this style of first-person horror just inevitably starts to lose its tension and scare factor when it drones on and on for 8+ hours. The longer titles in the series for instance both felt very "video gamey" at the end and the monsters started to just feel more like challenges in my way rather than terrifying threats I genuinely wanted, on a visceral level, to avoid. Even at this shorter length, once you get the hang of it, the beast of the bunker starts to feel this way a bit. I also don't think making the bunker's winding map even larger would've improved the game significantly as it's already easy to get lost, especially when the lights are out. I also was able to play the game in its entirety in a single day (with a few breaks in between) due to this length, which was an enjoyably immersive experience in itself. So while I've seen it as a criticism, I think The Bunker's ~4 hour length works great for what the game is trying to achieve.

I don't have too many complaints really. The game looks great. The story could be a little better but is still quite compelling. Other than the game locking up a few seconds every time you transition between sections of the bunker, I had no performance issues. There's also a great deal of attention to detail that heightens the immersive experience with realistic (at least by video game standards) healing and reload animations. I guess if I had to nit-pick something, there were a few too many of the rat enemies in the game and they tended to feel more annoying than enjoyable additions to the game.

Admittedly, some of why I enjoyed this game quite so much is probably because I went into it with such weirdly low expectations despite generally being a fan of the series. I think mindset often has way more to do with how much we enjoy games than we tend to want to admit and it had to have played a factor here especially as I had heard mixed things about this game that didn't help my enthusiasm. I played it as part of a 2023 October challenge to play 15 horror games in that month. I went in expecting this to be a more meh game on the list I'd try out to keep up to date on the hip horror games coming out, but didn't think I would enjoy it much. However, of the games I hadn't played before, it turned out to be my favorite of the month.

Amnesia The Bunker is a nice change of the usual format by Frictional horror games, the game takes its design clues from Alien Isolation by making the game and its levels designed in an all in one format with a stalker that roams the whole map. Fans of atmospheric and tense horror games will feel right at home with Amnesia as Frictional style is still apparent through hide and seek mechanic, dizzy look at the monster visuals, use of darkness and light and story told through notes or audiologs.

The bunker however makes things interesting by adding light immersive sim elements where you can tackle the situation in more than a single way, which offers a decent replay value.

While i enjoyed my playthrough with the game i still think that The Dark Descent is the pinnacle of the series, mainly because in TDD i was more immersed in the lovecraftian nature of the gothic Prussian castle, i liked the story more and Daniel voice despite the criticism was good for me, i liked the physics based puzzles and the sound and music design.

In this game they added a nice spin so that you can defend yourself, some resource management and more focus on exploration, i liked all of those things but i think with the inclusion of them it had more weight on the game, so it kinda makes it harder to nail the experience. I dont have many complaints about the game, i think the story was meh like whatever i didnt care for it, the gameplay was decent, i liked the atmosphere but it wasn't as impressive as TDD simply because the music wasn't hard hitting enough, in TDD the soundtrack played a huge part in scaring me, here it was barely there, the monster design is also less frightening, the lore and the nature of the bunker wasn't as scary either. I think it could've been less tedious with 1 or 2 more inventory slots too, and the finale was underwhelming.

Some extra notes on how i think the game can improve.

• The Stalker A.I and behavior pattern can be expanded and made smarter with more behavior patterns that can make how it moves and reacts more interesting, as of now its basic and too easy to maneuver.
• The music was forgettable, TDD OST is excellent and plays with your fears, here it was barely there and as a result the atmosphere suffered (still good)
• The inventory slots are too low, which can be challenging and encourages decision making, but because of the fuel and key items taking space it also makes things tedious with backtracking that was just more annoying due to one save spot this one is less important.
• The story wasn't engaging enough, perhaps its the voice overs, perhaps its the themes, perhaps this type of horror stories works better with lovecraftian themes since its unknown and creepy, but here i feel it was needed to make things more clear and create a coherent and tight timeline for me to follow. Both SOMA and TDD have better stories so Frictional is capable.
• The threat on the player isn't very big, its just the rats and the stalker, perhaps some addition of monster type can make things better.
• There is a lack of puzzles, TDD managed to make interesting physics-based puzzles which makes the player think and sets up a nice change of tone and pace, here it was mostly explore or get the objective items and move on.

Overall, its a good horror game and a worthy play for fans of the series, but it has a lot more potential for the future.

What a surprise. What a really nice surprise.

I didn’t expect incredible things from The Bunker. I was cautiously optimistic because I had enjoyed my time with Rebirth after the mediocrity that was A Machine for Pigs, but still. How often can you keep going back to the well to deliver solid experiences? Pretty often, it turns out, if you’re Frictional Games. As of now, I am hard pressed to decide which Amnesia is my favourite between this and The Dark Descent. It would always be hard for The Bunker to surpass the enjoyment I experienced with the first game, but this really gives it a run for its money. And the interesting thing is that it does it in the most unexpected of ways.

From the cinematic war intro to its setting, the game goes above and beyond when it comes to separating itself from its predecessors. One thing it does miss the mark on in my opinion is that lack of initial tension buildup, since The Bunker pretty much throws you into the thick of it from the get go. And for the first time in the series, the player is given weapons - such as guns and grenades - to deal with enemies. This got me worried at first, but I quickly realised those were mainly used as deterrents, not as genuine damage inflictors. Because of that, that feeling of vulnerability, which I thoroughly appreciate in this series, is still all there. And due to the nature of its confined space, excellent sound and lighting work, and improved enemy AI, that feeling is back with a vengeance. At times, the Bunker has instilled in me a sense of dread only surpassed the Alien Isolation’s xenomorph’s superior AI programming - in fact, you get a lot of Isolation vibes in this game. There is surprisingly no fear mechanic in this entry, but I quickly understood I wasn't going to need it, since all in-game circumstances combined turn it into an afterthought due to how unsettling your experience can feel.

Another thing that needs to be said is that, unlike most of Frictional’s work so far, this leans into immersive sim elements in a significant manner: you are usually given a ton of different ways to approach a different situation, and the physics, which were already very satisfying in The Dark Descent, were turned up to 100 here, highly adding to the feeling of custom made experiences you craft as you go. And speaking of which, I have to give this game its flowers yet again. The degree of customisation this game has is insane. I played this very close to Halloween, which meant I benefited from The Bunker’s most recent upgrade. And with it, you can pretty much change everything in the game to your heart’s content. How heavy you want resource management to be, how you want the enemy to behave, how many extra bumps in the road you want to find, how easy you want navigation to become, how quickly you want to go through the intro, etc etc etc. In essence, how much you want to be challenged. You can customise this and many more aspects, from either extreme of the spectrum to anything in between. Sometimes you’ll do so because you find a particular aspect annoying (such as having to rely on the windup torch too much or going back to refill the generator too often), other times because you don’t agree with how a certain aspect is balanced, others even because you just want to experiment with stuff. And the best part is that, since that update, all you need to do to access these options is press and hold any button for 10 seconds in the difficulty selection screen, instead of having to having to beat the game once as stated.

All these options give The Bunker a sense of almost infinite replayability, which is fantastic to see and truly opens the doors of a potential terrifying experience to people who aren’t comfortable with those emotions, since if needed, they can simply tone everything down and enjoy the mood and story. And story is in fact one other thing I’d like to mention here. The Bunker doesn’t try to reinvent the storytelling wheel, nor does it have, in any way, the same world building as The Dark Descent. Instead, what you get is a concise, self-contained, solid narrative, one that ultimately rewards you for paying attention to texts and audiologs you find through exploration, and one that nevertheless tries to keep you engaged by throwing you some loose Amnesia lore bones here and there. In this strict lore tying sense, The Bunker doesn’t always do things successfully, as certain elements seem almost arbitrarily thrown in. Additionally, although I have little doubt it was fully intentional and I do appreciate the level design, it can get frustratingly disorientating in the bunker, even after a few gos. There are maps on a few walls, but I do think the game could’ve benefited from an always accessible Resident Evil-style map that changes to show you which rooms you’ve been to or cleared. As a final note, there are also some minor annoyances with certain difficulty modes that don’t seem well balanced. Ultimately, this isn’t much of an issue as it is an annoyance, since you can now adjust pretty much everything to your liking, but such will imply previous knowledge of the things you find annoying or feel are unbalanced to begin with. So your first run may feel a tad irksome.

In the end though, none of this matters much. At its core, Amnesia: The Bunker is a pretty incredible experience that mixes horror, tension and atmosphere in a highly effective way, infuses them with an immersive sim-type of approach, and throws them into a quasi-roguelike setting, one that will see you experiment, tense up, and above all have a lot of fun with it. It is a triumph of an evolved Amnesia formula, and an easy must play for fans of the survival horror genre. 8.5/10