‘Amnesia: The Bunker’ Review: It’s Best to Stay Quiet on the Western Front

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell

Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen

When one thinks about World War I, its dreaded gas and trench warfare, the first name that comes to mind is Wilfred Owen. Owen’s vivid poetry transports you right onto the battlefield and does not shy away from portraying the horrors of war. Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Bunker takes place in WWI and lets you experience Owen’s poetry in a more interactive form, along with the added visceral horror.

World War I, 1916, Western Front.

You are Henri Clement, a French soldier. You are in one of the trenches, there is a squad of Germans firing at you from above. Your friend Lambert shoots them down and urges you to head to the rendezvous point. When you finally get there, there are gas grenades thrown at you. Just as you start coughing up blood, Lambert again comes to your rescue with a gas mask.

You wake up in the infirmary of an underground bunker with no memory of how you got there. The only friendly face you see (briefly before he’s killed) tells you that all the officers have fled, leaving the soldiers to die. Your only hope of survival is to get hold of dynamite and a detonator to blow up the exit to leave.

If only it were that simple.

You are not alone in the bunker — there is a monster roaming this subterranean cavern with you. Hidden in the shadows, listening for your every move, waiting to rip you to shreds.

That’s the premise and it’s up to you to piece together what actually happened that led to this situation and fill in the blanks. The story is scattered throughout the bunker in the form of notes which you can collect while exploring. Players who hate reading can choose to entirely ignore this and play Amnesia: The Bunker purely as a horror game where one needs to get out of the labyrinth. The player sets the pace, you can go as fast as you want — guns blazing, eyes wide open, carpe diem — or you can choose to camp out in the safe room for over eight hours. It depends entirely on your playstyle and there is very little handholding. In terms of story, Amnesia: The Bunker doesn’t have as gripping a plot as SOMA or Amnesia: The Dark Descent (both by Frictional Games) but the mechanics of The Bunker definitely make it interesting.

The Bunker is an immersive sim where it feels like the Resident Evil franchise meets Alien: Isolation. It’s not a linear map, instead it’s a labyrinth with a safe room that’s your general hub. The safe room is your best friend, your safe space where you never feel quite as secure as you should. It’s where you save your game, lock yourself in for a moment of respite to cry when the horrors of the bunker (and the Beast) are getting to you and where you periodically fill the generator to keep it running.

This generator supplies power to most areas of the bunker, which does keep the Beast away, but it does burn through gasoline very, very fast. So, one needs to be strategic about the fuel consumption.

The safe room also has a storage box where you can dump excess inventory that you pick up on your recon trips throughout the game. You have very limited inventory space, though it can be upgraded via pocket bags found in the bunker (but it isn’t much). Therefore, there’s a lot of backtracking in this game, which should be expected with the maze-like layout. You need to gather as much as you can every scouting trip — dog tags, bandages, notes… anything and everything.

The limited inventory forces you to debate the pros and cons of every single item before venturing out of the safe zone. You need to choose wisely. Should you take the stopwatch that tells you when the fuel is going to run out? Perhaps the wrench so you can unscrew the vents to access locked rooms? Or maybe the lighter which can power torches, cause fires and an infinitely quieter source of illumination than the chargeable flashlight?

Speaking of the flashlight, it’s the infinite light source in the game that you get acquainted with in the beginning. Silence is the key to safety in the bunker. The Beast has very sharp hearing and is constantly listening for any sound you make as you move around the bunker. The flashlight makes a lot of noise while charging, which you need to do often, lest you be left in the dark. The monster that is stalking you is attracted to the noise. It’s a truly diabolical design.

Frictional Games does such a good job at creating the tension and anxiety of being stalked. Nothing is there. Nothing is causing a problem. Your inventory is filled to bursting. You know for certain that there’s no way the monster is going to show up so early on in the game, yet you are so on edge. You have to be so incredibly quiet as you traverse through the bunker, however difficult the game makes it to do so.

The full physics system that Amnesia is famous for does not help, though taking your friendly neighborhood inanimate object with you to talk to as you slowly lose your sanity is both tempting and fun. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the game that teaches you to close doors, a lesson that carries all the way down to Amnesia: The Bunker. One has to be ever vigilant and conscious of how much noise is made while charging that flashlight or opening a door or running into a stray wine bottle, you need to pay attention to your surroundings.

You are also given a gun, there’s grenades to be found as well. Amnesia giving you a gun is odd, very odd and the gun does absolutely nothing to make you feel secure or safer.

First of all, ammo is scarce, there’s only one bullet per box coupled with the slow reload time; it makes using the gun a tense and helpless affair. There’s a catch-22, the guns and grenades are necessary to progress but using them attracts the Beast. The good news is that you could, of course, hurt the Beast, shoot it, throw a grenade at it and stall it temporarily. The bad news is that doing so just makes it mad. The monster becomes increasingly aggressive and gains resilience to damage. You may have managed to get by with a single bullet the first time, but the next encounter, the monster might as well be wearing Kevlar. The game is making sure you keep switching tactics, because the monster is learning. It keeps coming back, stronger and angrier. The softest of sounds leads to the swiftest demise. There is no escape, there is no separate monster hunt section and separate puzzle section. It’s just a dreadful all-in-one terrifying package neatly wrapped up in a bow.

There is a Custom Stories tab which opens up the possibility to a plethora of player-created campaigns which are always a fun experience to get to after beating the game. It’s nice (nostalgic, even) to see Frictional Games return to their roots, more than Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: The Bunker is reminiscent of Penumbra with its dark tunnels and growling dogs (the bunker has a growling monster instead).

Do you dare to venture into the bunker? Do you have what it takes to see the horrors that lurk in it, uncover the facts and face the truth? I leave you with words Owen wrote to his mother after three weeks at the front:

‘I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it, and in the darkness, felt.’