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Amnesia: The Bunker is not a very good Amnesia game. There is little grounding it in the lore of Amnesia. The WW1 bunker setting makes it feel a lot more like Penumbra than Amnesia. There aren't really puzzles. You get not one, but *two* guns, along with a litany of thrown weapons. That last point on its own feels a bit like sacrilege against the ethos of the subgenre that The Dark Descent was the progenitor of. Even if the weapon doesn't really do anything more than slow down the monster, having a way to defend yourself, even in such a meager way, really compromises a major facet of the game's atmosphere. The psychological impact of being truly defenseless is not felt when you're traipsing around the titular bunker armed to the teeth with more bullets and grenades than you can shake a stick at.
So if you're here looking for the next good Amnesia game after the last two fumbled the original's good name into a pair of mediocre sequels, this is not it. It's a bad Amnesia game. But as a survival horror game -- it's pretty solid!
The bunker itself is a really spooky environment. It's claustrophobic and poorly lit, even at the best of times. Your only light source in darkened areas is your hand-powered flashlight, which is loud as fuck and will attract the attention of the monster, Jerome, whenever you crank it, and the charge lasts about 15 seconds. It's a terrible flashlight, by design. Its explicitly AIDSerific nature is meant to compliment the game's core mechanic, that being the generator that you have to keep fueled up in order to keep Jerome at bay and explore the bunker unmolested, but the fuel does not last terribly long. It simultaneously offers you respite from the darkness and the promise of (relative) safety from ol' Jerry, while also pushing you into exploring the unlit and unvisited areas of the bunker to find more resources. Everything you do puts you on a timer, and you feel the pressure of the clock ticking down on you constantly. Ending up stranded in the dark in one of the farther areas of the bunker is an almost guaranteed death sentence, or at the very least a guaranteed hectic run and gun back to the stash room to get the generator up and running again. It's a great source of tension.
That core gameplay loop is actually compelling enough to carry the rest of the game almost on its own. It creates an atmosphere that is constant and oppressive, which goes hand in hand with the Frictional team's excellent map design and attention to detail. The bunker feels very lived in -- not just by its former human occupants, but also by our good friend Jerome. Let's talk about Jerome.
The monster in Amnesia: The Bunker is both its greatest strength and its greatest flaw. The dynamic AI means that Jerome is a constant looming threat no matter where you are. You'll hear him skittering around inside the walls, growling and screeching, following you everywhere. Fire a gun or toss a grenade or run around too much in an unsafe area and it's a matter of moments before Jerome's on top of you and snacking on your innards. He's very similar to the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation, though not nearly as consistent (or consistently irritating). There are holes in the walls all throughout the bunker which Jerome uses to stalk you around the base, which are themselves a serious source of tension, especially when placed directly next to your objectives. You can usually tell when he's nearby based on all the noise he makes, but every once in a while he decides to develop a mind of his own and go off script on you. He's supposed to hate the light and stay away from it, but he'll regularly come sniffing around where he's not welcome, spawning sometimes at complete random in fully lit areas. And Jerome is FAST AS FUKK BOIIIII
Nothing will stop him. Not doors, not tables, not closets, nothing. If you hear the "peekaboo I see you " noise, you've got about 1.5 seconds to pump a few bullets in him before he mulches your ass with his 1 hit kills, very much like the Xenomorph from Isolation. If he catches you, that's it.
But here's the thing: Jerome cheats, and he's very dumb. He's supposed to have this mechanic where he can track you based on the blood trail you leave behind from being injured, but it doesn't seem to work 100% correctly. I've had instances where Jerome has smashed tables I'm under and closets I'm inside of despite having not seen me and having full health, and I've also had instances where I was nearly dead and bleeding out gallons per second while Jerome meandered past completely oblivious, lost in thought trying to decide what he's going to watch on Netflix tonight. He's also a big b with a tiny p most of the time and won't actually come out of his hideyholes in areas you've explored no matter how much sprinting, grenade tossing, or flashlight pumping you engage in, except on the odd occasions that he changes his mind about it and comes to say hello six feet away from your home base without any provocation whatsoever. I didn't really find myself constantly paranoid about Jerome like I was with the Xenomorph, because his rules are inconsistent, and he'll let you do whatever you'd like most of the time. It really saps a lot of the atmosphere by the end when it becomes a game of remembering where you have to go while some weirdo breathes heavily in the walls and occasionally screams at you rather than having to actually be mindful of the helldemon on your tail. This is itself curtailed somewhat by the game's short running time -- I beat it in just under 5.5 hours according to the in game timer, at least an hour of which was spent dying to a frustrating killbox in the penultimate area, and then dying over and over again attempting to figure out how to get out of the final arena. If one knew what they were doing and knew where things were, I could easily imagine this game being beaten in under 1.5-2 hours, probably less than that, due to how the game's mechanics are put together to only soft-gate your progress instead of hard-gating it. The game suggests some sort of replay value with randomized item placements and door/locker codes, as well as a big old stats screen at the end, but I don't really know how much mileage there is to get out of that, other than the time trial aspect of it.
The story is nothing to write home about. None of the characters are really interesting, and the protagonist's involvement with the narrative's events are mostly incidental. Henri is not Daniel or Oswald, who were the prime movers of their narratives, tortured and conflicted characters whose actions set into motion all of the events of TDD and AMFP. He's not even like Tasi from Rebirth, who might have held a different role narratively to Daniel and Oswald, but at least had some greater motivation than "survive, idiot" and a connection to the other characters in the story. Henri is... I mean, he's just kinda there. You don't really learn much of anything about him, his amnesia is incidental, and he's not really the focus of the supernatural goings-on at the heart of the story. Nobody has any thoughts about Henri, and in turn Henri has little to say about any of them. His motivation is to escape the bunker. That's it.
Maybe that's all you need to make a good video game, but I really expect a little more from an Amnesia game. There aren't even multiple endings, a staple of the series, that's how barebones the story is. It's not great.
But overall, Amnesia: The Bunker is a tight, compelling experience, one which will keep you on the edge of your seat for most of its running time. $25 might be a bit high of a price to pay for something so short, but I still definitely recommend this game. Buy on sale when you feel like being spooked for a few hours.