Amnesia: The Bunker Review (Presto Ernesto)
Not only the best Amnesia game, but arguably one of the best horror games in general.
In Amnesia The Bunker you play as a french soldier in WWI who is trapped in a bunker together with a murderous creature. The gameplay is probably best described as a mini-version of Alien Isolation set in 1916. Amnesia The Bunker leaves most of the rather simplistic „walking simulator“ characteristics of past Amnesia games behind and plays much more like a survival-horror immersive sim or a stealth game.
Probably the biggest novelty is that you can use actual weapons to defend yourself. Now there are basically no other enemies besides the monster itself and a couple of aggressive rats (except for one creepy enemy in one particular spot later in the game which i won’t spoil), so the weapons are actually more useful for blowing doors open with explosive barrels. There are only two guns (the second one i didn’t even find in my playthrough) with very few available bullets and all they do is chasing away the monster for a couple of minutes anyway. The few additional explosives (grenades and molotov cocktails) are similarly useless in combat and serve basically just the same purpose as the guns, that is blowing obstacles away and maybe getting rid of some of the rats, but against the monster they won’t do sh*t.
The atmosphere is indeed pure terror. The first few minutes you just spent crawling through the trenches of WWI. This mainly serves as a tutorial for the controls, but it also sets the tone of how absolutely awful and horrible this place is that you are in now. When you wake up in the bunker completely alone and then proceed to sneak through the dimly lit tunnels and start to hear the monster rumbling in the walls or screaming in the distance, the atmosphere just gets amazingly terrifying. Of course, like in basically every horror game, the monster becomes a bit predictable and once you’ve explored the bunker, familiarized yourself with the layout enough and stocked up on helpful items, you’ll start to feel slightly more confident and the scare factor wears off a bit. But of all the horror games i‘ve played, this is one of the very few that manages to maintain a certain feeling of dread and uncertainty all the way through, especially when you start to uncover more and more of the unsettling story over the course of the game. The whole thing just has a perfectly paced suspense curve that smoothly goes from actual terror and immediate threat through the monster to a more creepy and gloomy vibe when you learn more about the unsettling backstory. On top, the sound does it‘s part very well: Even when you don’t hear the terrifying screams of the monster, the game constantly lets you know that you are completely f*cked, for example when it regularly makes you hear the loud bangs and booms of artillery fire outside the bunker. It’s as if the game tells you „even if you make it out of here, you‘re still in a world of sh*t and you‘re gonna die.“
Basically the only small weak point are the outdated grafics, but the atmosphere gets so intense that you barely notice them anymore after half an hour. Overall, Amnesia the Bunker is a phenomenal survival-horror game that for about a handful of hours won‘t fail to unsettle and terrorize you and you wouldn’t want it any other way. The varied gameplay mechanics are so much more engaging than the „walk-hide in closet-walk“ gameplay of some past Amnesia games and I liked it so much that i finished the whole thing in one session.
If this game doesn’t manage to give you at least a small sh*t-stain in your pants, nothing does (or you are clinically dead). Just make sure that you‘ll play in the proper environment: At night, alone, with headphones on!
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AMNESIA THE BUNKER
Genre: Survival-Horror / Stealth
Release: Q2 2023
( ) 0/8 Simply one of the worst games ever made. Don't waste any money on this.
( ) 1/8 Bad. Seriously flawed with barely any redeeming qualities. Worth a couple of Cents at best, if at all.
( ) 2/8 Sub-par. Only for hardcore-fans of respective genre / series. Don't pay more than 5 bucks.
( ) 3/8 Meh-diocre. It‘s okay. Don't pay more than 10 bucks.
( ) 4/8 Decent, but not for everybody. Don't pay more than 15 bucks.
( ) 5/8 Good game, Must-play for genre- / series-fans. Worth 20 to 25 bucks max, if you are not a fan.
(X) 6/8 Great game, universal recommendation. 30 bucks would be a steal for this.
( ) 7/8 Outstanding game, a milestone of it‘s respective genre. Definitely worth its full prize.
( ) 8/8 Simply one of the best games ever made. Get this, the prize doesn't matter.