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In brief: Fundamentally solid snack-sized survival horror that invokes both The Dark Descent and Resident Evil, but lacking in the promised gameplay variety, any kind of nuanced puzzle solving, or any real evolution from beginning to end. It feels very much like a test concept for Frictional Games to explore new gameplay mechanics in their existing formula. The story sadly lets itself down by failing to use the themes I thought it was setting up, but the atmosphere of being trapped in cramped tunnels with a prowling abomination that moves in dimensions you simply can't account for is undeniably terrifying.
In long: Amnesia: The Bunker puts you in the moldy boots of Henri Clément, French soldier in WWI, who awakens to find himself alone and trapped in a bunker underneath the trenches of an undisclosed battlefield. "Alone" isn't quite correct, however, as you are almost immediately faced with a ghastly creature that will stalk you throughout your entire quest to explore these bunkers and find a means of escape. The Beast (so it is named) invokes the behaviors of the now-iconic Resident Evil immortal stalker enemies, like T-00 or Jack Baker, but in this case there's an extra dimension of menace to it - almost literally, as the Beast can navigate a system of tunnels between areas that the player cannot access, meaning you're required to constantly track its movements by the sounds of it scurrying through the walls (at quite a clip, it must be said) and keep well aware of all points of entry to your location at all times.
While the Beast's AI isn't terribly complex, it frankly doesn't need to be. It's smarter by leagues than a Dark Descent grunt (I quite literally tried to block it in one of its holes using a wooden object, an effective strategy back then, only to learn from that mistake very quickly). All sounds can get its attention from a fair distance, and louder sounds like gunshots and explosions are obviously guaranteed to bring it running. This adds a need for consideration and strategy when making decisions on how to progress. Shooting a padlock off a door may be the most straightforward way to progress, but without knowing where to hide on the other side, this means you instead need to retreat to a location you can only tentatively believe to be safe. However, a clever player might come up with ways to hack the Beast to their advantage (gameplay spoiler: on a couple occasions, I used loud noises to summon the beast to batter down a door for me or clear out a swarm of rats that made it dangerous to progress).
Your most potent tool against the Beast are the lights: keeping the lights on compels it to stay in its own tunnels in the walls. You're not safe, to be clear, when the lights are on; not all areas are equally illuminated, and its sensitivity to noise may draw it out to hunt you down anyway. The lights, quite critically, will only remain on while the generator is running, and this is where my first gripe with the general gameplay loop comes in.
The generator needs a constant supply of fuel, which you can find as you explore. Each container of fuel takes up an inventory slot, and your inventory is extremely limited, even with sporadic bag upgrades. This means you're frequently making a trip into a new area, picking up a handful of items, then retreating back to the generator. This is more than just tedious, it also takes time away from the generator, compelling you to rush. While the game isn't unplayable with the lights off, it is significantly harder. Your only alternatives are your very, very noisy dynamo light, or a very faint lighter (which I didn't even find until late in the game). The Beast will spend much more time in the open with the lights out, meaning moving slowly and quietly isn't enough to avoid it. As such, you're compelled to keep the lights on, and move with haste to avoid losing time. This creates an immersion-breaking tendency to act impulsively to save time, and a frustration with slow progress that loses time. It became a habit of mine later in the game to explore an area slowly, learn where items where and how to get around, then reload back to when the generator was full in order to get through it all with my uncanny prescience. Keeping track of the generator is also annoyingly deceptive - you get a stopwatch early on that you can sync to the fuel gauge, but it is disingenuous as the stopwatch doesn't run in real time - the speed at which the generator burns fuel is based on the difficulty mode, so the stopwatch will show 60 minutes for a full generator when it actually only runs for about 15 minutes.
While I am uncertain how I would prefer they manage the generator and light concepts, I felt very removed from the experience every time I chose to lose progress rather than lose in-game time. While this mechanic did lead to a very tense sequence where I had to navigate the darkness from a (relatively) lengthy key hunt back to safety when the lights went out and the Beast emerged to prowl the halls, in general it led more often to frustrated restarts than any sense of terror.
In terms of other survival mechanics: you have access to a firearm, which you can use in desperate self-defense, but bullets are terrible scarce. Also, the Beast is unkillable, and harming it would only cause it to retreat at best. Your only hazards besides this persistent enemy are booby traps, presumably set up by your former comrades, and swarms of rats that will congregate around corpses and damage you if you get too close. These become things you have to manage as part of exploration, dispersing them temporarily or permanently, depending on your resources. Being wounded will attract rats to follow you, and noisy rats may also attract the beast, while also continuing to nibble on you as you go. Managing your health with healing items really only matters for keeping the rats at bay, because getting caught by the Beast is a one-hit kill (at least on Normal difficulty or above). My second significant gripe is that the cramped tunnels, while sensible for the setting, mean that you're sorely lacking in hiding places compared to previous Frictional games when the Beast draws near. I recall only one instance where I hid in a cupboard in classic Amnesia fashion.
Progressing through the game is generally just a key-hunt. I wouldn't ever call Dark Descent's puzzles giga-brain tier, but the absence of any kind of puzzles that take thought and awareness is sorely felt. You're just looking for key items - either literal keys, or items that act the same, like boltcutters - and just using them where you're supposed to. While the game boasts about replayability, and the "emergent gameplay" experience of finding ways around obstacles, there really isn't nearly enough depth for that to feel like a feature rather than an exaggerated marketing blurb.
As far as the story is concerned, I could wax about all the ways it let me down, but to keep it spoiler-free: the game sets up a handful of solid, if not exactly novel, psychological themes that it could have explored. Instead, by the end, it chose to squander all of that opportunity by very, *very* weakly tying it together with the lore of the previous games (Rebirth, specifically). It was bad enough to lose that potential for psychological depth just to revolve around very token supernatural themes, but this link to Amnesia canon more or less just references it rather than contributes to it.
But at the end of the day, the game had a strong enough atmosphere, cohesive (if basic) mechanics, and a tight grip on its pacing, which are the three most important strengths for a horror game. I hope this is a launching pad for Frictional to inject new life into the frankly stagnant formula they've stuck to for over 15 years.