After watching the movie 1917, I’ve been struck with this longing for a horror game or film or something set in the trenches of the WWI frontlines. Wouldn’t that be terrifying? The dark, cramped confines of a 10ft deep trench, with something ominous chasing you from behind. You can’t go over, or risk certain death from gunfire, and you can’t go back without being something’s meal. The only way out is forward into a maze of claustrophobic tunnels and winding serpentine-like dirt halls, surrounded by the dead of a lost generation.
While Amnesia: The Bunker doesn’t quite execute on my desire for a trench-based horror game, it definitely agrees with me on using the first World War as a setting for horror. The inherently gritty nature of the low-tech, dark, dangerous and grim setting of No Man’s Land makes for some thrilling horror. The developers certainly capitalize on their settings to make the game extra tense.
Amnesia: The Bunker opens in the frontline trenches of the First World War. As a member of the French infantry, you and your friend must navigate through the horror of war and reach a rendezvous point just beyond the trench. Unfortunately, all goes wrong and you don’t make it before succumbing to German fire.
You later wake up in an underground field hospital. Fresh from a coma and stricken with amnesia, you wander the desolate and empty halls of the bunker until you find a dying comrade, who explains the gravity of the situation you’re in. The bunker is haunted by some strange, deadly creature, and the officers have blown the only exit shut. In his dying breaths, the soldier explains to you the game’s simple goal: Find a way out of the bunker.
The bunker is the primary setting of the game and is a pretty brilliant place to set a horror game like Amnesia. The entire thing is dark and claustrophobic, with narrow hallways that stretch on into patches of darkness you just don’t want to walk into. Locked doors and blocked tunnels turn a relatively small area into a maze, navigating which will use up your most precious of resources, time.
To keep the monster away in Amnesia: The Bunker, you need to keep the lights on. To do so, you feed fuel that you discover around the bunker to a generator located just next to your save room. While this may seem simple at first, with fuel initially easy to come by, those minutes start to add up quickly and before you know it the lights will be out — and the monster will come hunting.
Without lights, your only hope of evading the monster is to remain quiet. This is a deceptively difficult task, as Amnesia: The Bunker cleverly uses sound as one of the biggest gatekeepers to progress. Need a key item locked behind a door? You’re not going to find a key to open it. You’ll have to bash the door down with a heavy brick, blow it open with a grenade, or shoot the lock off. Destruction being one of your main tools of progression is an interesting way to make use of limited supplies like bullets, grenades, and even bricks, while also forcing the player to make the decision to attract the monster’s attention in order to progress.
Much like the rats that infested the trenches at the time, the monster in Amnesia: The Bunker travels around them using tunnels, the exits of which you can find all over the map. This makes tracking the monster’s location a near-impossible challenge. While you might hear it shambling around in one area, it can appear almost anywhere, so your best bet is always to stay as quiet as possible.
The puzzles in Amnesia: The Bunker are fairly simple, which is a relief considering how much tension the game builds up. You’re never really tasked with doing anything more complicated than finding codes for locked areas or key items. If the game asked too much more from you, it would probably be borderline impossible to escape the bunker.
Though the game has a great feeling of tension, it began to fall off when I realized how useful the lights were. At one point during my playthrough, after I initially got the generator running and was working on finding some codes, I decided I wanted to see the monster firsthand. After saving my game, I began making as much noise as possible. Sprinting, throwing grenades, shooting my gun, etc. The most I got was the creature’s hand reaching out from one of the tunnels, and then quickly retreating.
Maybe I was a bit too early into the game for there to be any real threat, but the feeling of tension that came from every scratch in the wall and shambling of the supposedly deadly monster went away when I realized I could basically make as much sound as I wanted. Progression from this point became easy, and it also made it a little bit harder to stay invested in the game as a whole.
I would not, however, attempt this experiment with the lights off. While I eventually felt like I had free range of the place with the generator running, I quickly became aware of how quickly the clock was ticking on the fuel timer. While you may be able to get away with a lot when the generator is running, that fuel will, eventually, run out. Then, it becomes a different game.
The Final Word
Amnesia: The Bunker is a thrilling horror game that makes fantastic use of its setting to keep players tense, scared, and desperate to keep the lights on.
8
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Amnesia: The Bunker is available on Steam, Epic Games, and PlayStation.