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- Dec 16, 2015
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I bought this a while ago on a Steam Sale but just didn't get around to it until this week. This game does for me today what REmake on the GCN did for me back in 2002. This is without hyperbole one of the greatest horror games ever made.
I have never been so scared of a game in my life, and yet the Immersive Sim element is done in such masterful fashion I couldn't stop playing. I wanted to stop but couldn't. Immersive Sim fans have been treated pretty well recently. Ctrl Alt Ego is an absolute masterpiece, as is Cruelty Squad. There are a number of indie ImSims coming up that look very promising as well. But Amnesia The Bunker took emerging gameplay elements and fused it perfectly with the survival horror genre. The product is a short but extremely sweet and absolutely relentless assault on your primitive prey instincts.
Adding to the terror of my own personal experience with this game was the fact that since I hadn't been paying a whole lot of attention, I thought The Bunker was just a World War I game. Like a military survival sim. I was well aware of The Dark Descent but for whatever reason I was under the impression that this was going to be a gritty, realistic reenactment of trench warfare. The hilarity is that for the first five or ten minutes it certainly feels that way.
I was almost underwhelmed by the opening. The graphics are by no means eye-popping. Sound and music were top notch though.
However after my character sustained damage from a battle against Germany invading France, it soon becomes clear that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
************************************************SPOILER LINE*******************************************************************
You wake up in a germaphobe's nightmare. Everything is dirty. Lights are flickering. You hear the occasional bomb muffled heavily by the armored underground fortress in which you now step. And one thing that dawned on me very quickly was this thought of "Huh. Everything's quiet, and I'm making a lot of noise. I mean my steps are really loud."
After picking up a few notes and a disturbing photo as is standard fare in Frictional games, you find a single living person near the ruined, abandoned pantry. He tells you that the bunker has been abandoned-- its exit sealed by explosions. He gives you a couple general clues on where you can find the missing components to reopen the exit.
He also asks you to kill him.
But as you go to the pantry to pick up rounds to grant his grim ask, he disappears screaming.
One of the things that amazes me about this game is the pacing. Some of you know I'm an Alien fan, partly because the first half of the movie is dedicated entirely to hard and soft world building. You're treated to something similar here because you're stumbling around in the darkness, and nothing is really happening. As you get acquainted with the layout you start noticing things like fuel canisters you can pick up, clothing to combine together to make bandages (these are things revealed to you in the trench opening), and rats scurrying about, into their little holes.
You also start noticing other holes.
Big holes.
Holes that were not made by rats.
And you start hearing things. In the walls. Something big. Not a rat. And yet still nothing happens. You arrive at administration office which will become your base of operations. There are two doors here, and I did notice-- big steel doors with locks. Hmm. The map is presented on the wall here in this office, and only here. You can't take it with you. Did you wander into the offices and get lost? Tough shit. Find your way back and look at the goddamn map in the office.
And let me just say one of the most brilliant things about this game is how it deals with maps. I'm sick of minimaps. I believe a lot of times minimaps are used in lieu of good level design. If you throw a minimap into your game you don't have to have smart, cohesive level design. Because you have a minimap. I recently finished Dragon Age II and before it, Dragon Age Origins and as much as I love DAO, I found myself in both games focusing on the minimap instead of what was actually on the screen. In DA2 especially, some pretty bland level design uses this as a crutch and I just continually fell into this habit of watching the arrow go through lines in the corner of the screen. It was one of my criticisms of Skyward Sword which admittedly used "dowsing" instead which is creative, but still a crutch.
One thing I will add is that as you progress into the other areas you will find appendices that will update your main map at base. But there is no minimap to be found in Amnesia: The Bunker. There is, however a handy dandy flashlight from the Civil War era, which winds up. You crank this thing a few times and it gives you about 15-20 seconds of light, and again I noticed--- "This thing makes a lot of noise."
Not a chance THIS ever becomes an issue.
Resident Evil-esque puzzles await you. A wheel to open a quarantine lock, a wrench to loosen bolts on vent covers that you can't take off otherwise, and the survival horror quintessentials, bolt cutters and lighter. The combining of cloth isn't just for bandages- you make torches, Molotov cocktails and probably other things I wasn't creative enough to figure out. There's a centralized locker room with essential items locked, and each one has a padlock whose combinations can only be found on dogtags you'll find throughout the bunker. Also every playthrough gives randomized combinations so on subsequent runs you won't be able to just beeline to the locker room and grab your shotgun, gas mask and other quest items. Nope, you'll have to go into the darkness and grab these tags to get the goods. Numerous light switches are found and serve as progression points for you. Sometimes you'll have to get a sequence of them, a chain if you will, in order for them all to function and give you visibility on precious resources and story notes.
The immersive sim elements are perfectly folded into this masterpiece. You will often find that there are numerous ways to get where you need to go. This goes hand in hand with the fact that most items are randomized as well. The difference between wood and steel plays a crucial element here. There will be times when you won't be able to open a door without triggering a trap, or open it at all, unless you find a brick somewhere and bash the wooden frame out or use a grenade. It goes without saying that these methods also create a lot of noise. Keys exist, but you'll find that box stacking and the like are just as pertinent.
Another really cool thing about this game is the weapons system. Ammo is scarce. I mean really scarce. I found twelve rounds for the revolver my first playthrough. And I only found five shotgun shells and never found the shotgun on the first run. These weapons are an absolute last resort. This is what you use when you have literally no other option. And to emphasize how important they are and yet how seldom they should be used, the loading mechanic is such that you hold down the R button to open the cylinder, and then you load each round individually one by one.
Not that you'll have many fucking rounds anyway. I never had a full six in the chamber. If you have four, you're lucky. The shotgun is the same-- each shell is loaded individually. So even if you had a bunch of rounds to use, loading your gun is a dynamic in which you will not be able to reload in the heat of the moment.
And did I mention that the generator located in the admin office, runs on gasoline, and will deplete? One of the most useful tools in the game is a timer that reads how long you have given how much fuel you've put in. When it runs out, it doesn't matter where you are--- all the lights everywhere go out, and you're plunged into darkness.
And in the darkness, he comes out to hunt for you.
I won't post full reveals but this stalker, known only by the soldiers as "the beast", is cunning, patient and unspeakably terrifying. The term "beast" is appropriate because while this thing is not a mindless creature, it isn't human either. Its AI is better than that of the Xenomorph and Mr. X, and the musical cues serve as panic-inducing but useful hints as to its location, disposition and most importantly, whether it knows where you are. I've done a few playthroughs and what I've found is that it has a "dormant" stage, in which it's crawling around in the walls and ceiling, but not aware of your location. This is when you have the lights on. But even if you flip on every switch in the game, there are many places that just don't have sufficient lighting. It is in these pockets which he will emerge from the large tunnels he's dug and investigate. And while he hates light, he will absolutely make a beeline to the site of a grenade explosion and kill you. If you wind up your little flashlight toy to close to where he is, he's gonna come see what's making the noise. If you're running, odds are he's going to start tracking you. I don't know yet if walking attracts him but there have been occasions where I wasn't paying attention to the sound of my own footsteps and found me.
One cool hint. If you see a group of rats feasting on a corpse, they serve as an obstacle. You can't cross over them without them scratching and damaging you, and they won't get tired and leave. You need to burn them and/or the body in order to remove them from the game. But if you see them spazz out and run away for no reason, you have about ten seconds before the Beast arrives. He can open doors. If you're wounded he will follow your blood trail right to you. If you're bandaging up out in the open he is liable to grab you from behind. If you go into your home base, the admin office, you'd better make sure both doors are locked with their deadbolts because he will come into your safe space and wreck your shit.
And if the generator runs out of juice, he will come out of the walls and prowl around looking for you. He won't sit and wait for noises. He will actively look for you.
All these elements are juggled in a hell-ride. Any time you hear an abrupt growl you will have to decide whether you want to completely freeze and hope he's not coming your way, or bolt and risk running right into him on your sprint to the office. It's a five hour panic attack. I screamed like a little bitch on numerous occasions.
This GAME is 10/10. If you love survival horror you need to play this game. If you love immersive sims you won't be able to stop playing this game. While the graphics are using the somewhat dated Frictional engine, the lighting is superb. The sound and music are 10/10 as I mentioned before.
PLAY THIS GAME
I have never been so scared of a game in my life, and yet the Immersive Sim element is done in such masterful fashion I couldn't stop playing. I wanted to stop but couldn't. Immersive Sim fans have been treated pretty well recently. Ctrl Alt Ego is an absolute masterpiece, as is Cruelty Squad. There are a number of indie ImSims coming up that look very promising as well. But Amnesia The Bunker took emerging gameplay elements and fused it perfectly with the survival horror genre. The product is a short but extremely sweet and absolutely relentless assault on your primitive prey instincts.
Adding to the terror of my own personal experience with this game was the fact that since I hadn't been paying a whole lot of attention, I thought The Bunker was just a World War I game. Like a military survival sim. I was well aware of The Dark Descent but for whatever reason I was under the impression that this was going to be a gritty, realistic reenactment of trench warfare. The hilarity is that for the first five or ten minutes it certainly feels that way.
I was almost underwhelmed by the opening. The graphics are by no means eye-popping. Sound and music were top notch though.
However after my character sustained damage from a battle against Germany invading France, it soon becomes clear that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
************************************************SPOILER LINE*******************************************************************
You wake up in a germaphobe's nightmare. Everything is dirty. Lights are flickering. You hear the occasional bomb muffled heavily by the armored underground fortress in which you now step. And one thing that dawned on me very quickly was this thought of "Huh. Everything's quiet, and I'm making a lot of noise. I mean my steps are really loud."
After picking up a few notes and a disturbing photo as is standard fare in Frictional games, you find a single living person near the ruined, abandoned pantry. He tells you that the bunker has been abandoned-- its exit sealed by explosions. He gives you a couple general clues on where you can find the missing components to reopen the exit.
He also asks you to kill him.
But as you go to the pantry to pick up rounds to grant his grim ask, he disappears screaming.
One of the things that amazes me about this game is the pacing. Some of you know I'm an Alien fan, partly because the first half of the movie is dedicated entirely to hard and soft world building. You're treated to something similar here because you're stumbling around in the darkness, and nothing is really happening. As you get acquainted with the layout you start noticing things like fuel canisters you can pick up, clothing to combine together to make bandages (these are things revealed to you in the trench opening), and rats scurrying about, into their little holes.
You also start noticing other holes.
Big holes.
Holes that were not made by rats.
And you start hearing things. In the walls. Something big. Not a rat. And yet still nothing happens. You arrive at administration office which will become your base of operations. There are two doors here, and I did notice-- big steel doors with locks. Hmm. The map is presented on the wall here in this office, and only here. You can't take it with you. Did you wander into the offices and get lost? Tough shit. Find your way back and look at the goddamn map in the office.
And let me just say one of the most brilliant things about this game is how it deals with maps. I'm sick of minimaps. I believe a lot of times minimaps are used in lieu of good level design. If you throw a minimap into your game you don't have to have smart, cohesive level design. Because you have a minimap. I recently finished Dragon Age II and before it, Dragon Age Origins and as much as I love DAO, I found myself in both games focusing on the minimap instead of what was actually on the screen. In DA2 especially, some pretty bland level design uses this as a crutch and I just continually fell into this habit of watching the arrow go through lines in the corner of the screen. It was one of my criticisms of Skyward Sword which admittedly used "dowsing" instead which is creative, but still a crutch.
One thing I will add is that as you progress into the other areas you will find appendices that will update your main map at base. But there is no minimap to be found in Amnesia: The Bunker. There is, however a handy dandy flashlight from the Civil War era, which winds up. You crank this thing a few times and it gives you about 15-20 seconds of light, and again I noticed--- "This thing makes a lot of noise."
Not a chance THIS ever becomes an issue.
Resident Evil-esque puzzles await you. A wheel to open a quarantine lock, a wrench to loosen bolts on vent covers that you can't take off otherwise, and the survival horror quintessentials, bolt cutters and lighter. The combining of cloth isn't just for bandages- you make torches, Molotov cocktails and probably other things I wasn't creative enough to figure out. There's a centralized locker room with essential items locked, and each one has a padlock whose combinations can only be found on dogtags you'll find throughout the bunker. Also every playthrough gives randomized combinations so on subsequent runs you won't be able to just beeline to the locker room and grab your shotgun, gas mask and other quest items. Nope, you'll have to go into the darkness and grab these tags to get the goods. Numerous light switches are found and serve as progression points for you. Sometimes you'll have to get a sequence of them, a chain if you will, in order for them all to function and give you visibility on precious resources and story notes.
The immersive sim elements are perfectly folded into this masterpiece. You will often find that there are numerous ways to get where you need to go. This goes hand in hand with the fact that most items are randomized as well. The difference between wood and steel plays a crucial element here. There will be times when you won't be able to open a door without triggering a trap, or open it at all, unless you find a brick somewhere and bash the wooden frame out or use a grenade. It goes without saying that these methods also create a lot of noise. Keys exist, but you'll find that box stacking and the like are just as pertinent.
Another really cool thing about this game is the weapons system. Ammo is scarce. I mean really scarce. I found twelve rounds for the revolver my first playthrough. And I only found five shotgun shells and never found the shotgun on the first run. These weapons are an absolute last resort. This is what you use when you have literally no other option. And to emphasize how important they are and yet how seldom they should be used, the loading mechanic is such that you hold down the R button to open the cylinder, and then you load each round individually one by one.
Not that you'll have many fucking rounds anyway. I never had a full six in the chamber. If you have four, you're lucky. The shotgun is the same-- each shell is loaded individually. So even if you had a bunch of rounds to use, loading your gun is a dynamic in which you will not be able to reload in the heat of the moment.
And did I mention that the generator located in the admin office, runs on gasoline, and will deplete? One of the most useful tools in the game is a timer that reads how long you have given how much fuel you've put in. When it runs out, it doesn't matter where you are--- all the lights everywhere go out, and you're plunged into darkness.
And in the darkness, he comes out to hunt for you.
I won't post full reveals but this stalker, known only by the soldiers as "the beast", is cunning, patient and unspeakably terrifying. The term "beast" is appropriate because while this thing is not a mindless creature, it isn't human either. Its AI is better than that of the Xenomorph and Mr. X, and the musical cues serve as panic-inducing but useful hints as to its location, disposition and most importantly, whether it knows where you are. I've done a few playthroughs and what I've found is that it has a "dormant" stage, in which it's crawling around in the walls and ceiling, but not aware of your location. This is when you have the lights on. But even if you flip on every switch in the game, there are many places that just don't have sufficient lighting. It is in these pockets which he will emerge from the large tunnels he's dug and investigate. And while he hates light, he will absolutely make a beeline to the site of a grenade explosion and kill you. If you wind up your little flashlight toy to close to where he is, he's gonna come see what's making the noise. If you're running, odds are he's going to start tracking you. I don't know yet if walking attracts him but there have been occasions where I wasn't paying attention to the sound of my own footsteps and found me.
One cool hint. If you see a group of rats feasting on a corpse, they serve as an obstacle. You can't cross over them without them scratching and damaging you, and they won't get tired and leave. You need to burn them and/or the body in order to remove them from the game. But if you see them spazz out and run away for no reason, you have about ten seconds before the Beast arrives. He can open doors. If you're wounded he will follow your blood trail right to you. If you're bandaging up out in the open he is liable to grab you from behind. If you go into your home base, the admin office, you'd better make sure both doors are locked with their deadbolts because he will come into your safe space and wreck your shit.
And if the generator runs out of juice, he will come out of the walls and prowl around looking for you. He won't sit and wait for noises. He will actively look for you.
All these elements are juggled in a hell-ride. Any time you hear an abrupt growl you will have to decide whether you want to completely freeze and hope he's not coming your way, or bolt and risk running right into him on your sprint to the office. It's a five hour panic attack. I screamed like a little bitch on numerous occasions.
This GAME is 10/10. If you love survival horror you need to play this game. If you love immersive sims you won't be able to stop playing this game. While the graphics are using the somewhat dated Frictional engine, the lighting is superb. The sound and music are 10/10 as I mentioned before.
PLAY THIS GAME
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