After growing up with Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it took me a while to play horror games without some sort of shooting or self defense mechanics. Even so, I've always been at least familiar with Amnesia. Everyone was. Pewdiepie and all of early YouTube let's players shoved The Dark Descent down your throat, and I'd guess a lot of people's opinions towards it come from watching someone else playing. Sources are: me, since up until the pandemic, I had never touched the game prior. I say this because, to this day, there is a prevailing sentiment (which I myself shared) towards The Dark Descent as a "walking sim". Granted, it and other games from its time certainly influenced the genre's birth, but labeling Amnesia as one is at best anachronistic, or worse, uninformed. I will talk more about The Dark Descent later on, but this sustained perception is important to note in advance, since The Bunker certainly feels like a direct response.

Keen eyed high IQ gamers may notice that, unlike the previous three entries (and Soma (and the Penumbra trilogy)), The Bunker gives you a gun. It's shown in all promotional material and the game's cover art, with clear intent to signal how this one is not like the others. You're not a pregnant french woman, you're a french soldier. With a gun. A grounded survival horror game with resource management, metroidvania-esque tools that both serve to unlock new areas and to repurpose already seen interactions coupled with an unkillable monster who stalks you around and forces the player to come up with improvised solutions does sound like a great comeback to the franchise (unlike the unaptly named Rebirth). That did spark my interest, being always hungry for good horror games. After playing it, I vaguely remember having a positive experience and recommending it to some friends.

Two years passed. The Bunker is crawling back into my subconscious.

When I like a game, I tend to revisit it sometime in the future, even games that don't necessarily incentivize replayability. But with this game, the feeling was weirdly absent. It has four difficulties to choose from, multiple customization options and tweaks to randomize and mix up the gameplay loop, and after you beat it for the first time, it screams at you "Hey, look at all the ways you can shuffle things around! Play it again!". Not having any desire to hop back in was off putting, to say the least. Counterintuitively, that made the idea of returning to it more appealing.

The whole reason behind this preamble is to say that I've played and replayed Amnesia: The Bunker multiple times, seen everything it has to offer, and came to the conclusion that it's mediocre. Which is fine, lots of things are. But The Bunker's faults are outrageously frustrating, almost like it was made with the sole purpose to annoy me. It has all the aces, but can never stick the landing.

In the intro I mentioned how The Dark Descent was seen by many as a walk/hide/run game with no "real" gameplay, which is incorrect. There's a constant tug of war with the sanity and light source mechanics, where one cannot simply hide in the dark waiting for monsters to leave, since the lack of light drains your mental health. On the other hand, that same light makes the player more visible to threats that drain your actual health. Every time you're in the dark there's a decision to make: should I pull out my lamp for a while so the next area can be less draining, or try to push forward to a safer area? You might need that lamp fuel later. Whichever choice you think is best, make it quick, because the clock's ticking, and you're getting madder. Sure, it's not a RE4 suplex, but the player is unquestionably engaged with constant decisions to make. In theory, The Bunker - with its new gameplay additions - should be a natural extension of said decisions. Do I waste a bullet on this lock when it might save my life later on? Do I use gasoline to get more time with the lights on or do I burn these rats blocking my path? And so on.

The problem here is execution. Even though this is the fourth game in the Amnesia franchise, a more apt point of comparison would be Alien: Isolation, where The Bunker takes most of its ideas from. Painticus made a funny but still true comparison to Granny, but both games got beat by Monstrum. All of them do the concept (remote location, escape tools in random spots, unkillable monster) better than The Bunker. Monstrum and Granny get away with clunky ai and bullshit deaths by being barely an hour long, with every new attempt allowing and incentivizing different strategies and playstyles. Isolation is a more linear, plot driven experience, with less variety and replayability, but it compensates that with pacing; every new tool, enemy, character and level is introduced gradually and thoughtfully. I don't exactly love Isolation, but I also don't expect anything other than a slightly more dense gameplay experience compared to Bioshock. The Bunker is linear, but also somewhat random. The dynamite will always be in the arsenal, the beast will always pop out when you reach the chapel, the chain cutters will always be with the prisoner, etc. With the exception of the comms key, all non required items will spawn in random spots or lockers with random codes every new playthrough.

More importantly, the revolver - by far the best tool available - is the first item you get when starting, and will probably never leave your inventory. 8mm bullets are exceptionally more versatile and practical than most items you can find. Of course, the game balances giving the player such a useful tool early on by doing... nothing really. My only guess for doing so is to not scare away the "Amnesia has no gameplay" crowd by potentially having a big chunk of game with no gun. Ammo shortage might be a problem if you're really trigger happy, but less ammo has no effect if there's not a lot of reasons to use it in the first place. Bullets will either be spent on locks (because you can't find keys, like, literally never) or as a get out of jail card for when the beast is in your way.

And it gets in your way. All the fucking time. Not in any challenging way per se, more in a "stop whatever it is that you're doing and go hide under a desk for 5min" way. A bunker is, as expected, cramped, with long but narrow corridors and small storage rooms, so the most spacious spaces are dining halls or dorms, which are still tiny. There's no agency left for the player when all rooms have one entry and exit point. By comparison, Monstrum takes place in a massive cargo ship; there's an engine floor, a labyrinth of containers, recreational rooms, a helicopter pad, a quarterdeck, etc. More importantly, it gives you room to run, to act upon an encounter. Granny players know the feeling of crouching under the second floor railing and dropping down to escape imminent death. Isolation has a more aggressive foe in the xenomorph, who doesn't fuck around; if it sees you, you're dead. The game mitigates that with an entire spaceship to explore, plenty of distraction tools, better stealth mechanics and other humans for the alien to chew on. In other words, you can do things. In The Bunker, if the beast is near, you either hide and wait for it to go away, or shoot it when you're bored of waiting. It'll wail around and maybe break a couple of chairs, and then leave eventually (after 3.5 playthroughs it found me while hiding once, because I was fucking around with the camera and clipping my head against the closet door).

In the Deus Ex postmortem at GDC 2017, Warren Spector talks about a Thief level that he couldn't beat, and how he asked other Looking Glass devs to make the player strong enough to fight the guards. They said no. The point of the game is to sneak, so you should sneak. The thing is, you can fight the guards, it's just that Garrett sucks with swords. There isn't a literal game over screen when you get spotted, but you know you fucked up. It's smart, timeless game design. I'm using Thief as an example of intended play; how game designers can tell the player - diegetically or not - to do or not to do certain things while fully expecting you to ignore their advice. This can be used for jokes, (Portal 2), really good jokes (The Stanley Parable), or sometimes to guide the player into playing the game a certain way (Dark Souls).

The Bunker feels like an evil version of this design. It boasts multiple times in loading screens and tutorial popups of its supposed player freedom, that "if you think something might be possible to do, it probably is", just to see you try to do anything other than The Solution That Works Every Time™(shooting) and fail. Want to read some notes to try and find where someone stored a key to this locked metal door? Sorry, no keys. Shoot the lock. Out of grenades to blow open this wooden door? Well, why not try throwing a brick? Good luck finding one. If I had to guess, there's maybe 5 bricks in the whole map, and are almost always placed right next to where you could use one. Well, maybe use one of those gas canisters to burn the door? No. Just no. French wooden doors don't burn, you dumb fuck. Speaking of doors, you might find one booby trapped. Tough luck. You can't disarm grenade traps on door frames, even though the game lets you cut normal wire traps with the bolt cutter, leading to some truly idiotic moments of triggering traps you know are there and can't do anything about them other than running away.

This constant unwillingness to commit with its promises also affects gameplay in tangible, annoying ways. One of the other threats inside the bunker are human eating rats. They munch on your comrade';s corpses, and can also munch on you, blocking your way in some instances. You can't run or jump over them without getting bitten, which causes bleeding (actually all damage sources make you bleed, including fire and gas. Of course). When you bleed, a lone “recon” rat keeps following your blood trail and screeching loudly, attracting the beast. So, it's in your best interest to get rid of them silently without hurting yourself. Seems like a logical, interesting problem for the player to deal with. Simple enough; burn them. If you try doing so, you'll realize using fuel to burn rats is finicky to the point of being comedic. Even though Henri throws an entire litre of gasoline on the floor, the game only considers very specific spots burnable, requiring a pixel hunt to know where to use your lighter. In trying to find said spots, that gets you closer to the rats, who'll bite you. If you get close enough to not trigger the rats but manage to light the fire, you might get burnt, which, again, makes you bleed. That is, if you even have a lighter, an optional item you can miss. Otherwise, you're stuck with throwable flares, who tend to miss more often than not. You also can't pick up the flare to try again, it's just stuck to the ground. Once again, you very much could go through the headache of making the videogame work. Or just. Fucking. Shoot. Them. Look, I love shooting rats in games — in fact most of my all time favourites feature some pest control —, but here it just feels dumb, like I'm pushing a circle peg on a square hole, and it's probably because I am. The square peg is the gun, because this game has one!

I guess I have other pet peeves. There's a great effort to immerse you in the setting with period accurate posters, guns and other props. And then the characters start speaking English with French accents (which doesn't apply to the Germans, for some reason). Same deal with the bunker's wall signs. Story's fine, doesn't have the same impact that The Dark Descent and A Machine For Pigs had. There's a single moment where it does something to me. At some point, you need to enter a pill box to retrieve a soldier's locker code. After climbing into it, the ambience changes drastically; you're almost out. You can see the skies and the mud, hear the wind plowing through all the life outside. The dim orange sky feels blissful compared to the artificial bright lamps and torches inside, it's beautiful. If you approach the window more closely, reality sets in; a German sniper shoots right next to you, missing by inches. You've seen things no one would even fathom, been through hell, then some more, then worse, and finally emancipation is at an arm's reach, but humanity is once again too busy killing each other. Cool stuff.

In trying to address the notion of making games where players can only walk, hide and run, Frictional made a game where the only fun (read: less migraine inducing) way to engage with it is to walk, hide and run.

And shoot. Did you know there's a gun in this one?