The year is 1916, and the French are in the middle of the war, fighting against the Germans. You wake up inside of an infirmary in a bunker, with no memory of how you got there. All that matters is that you must get out. Your survival depends on this.
There are tools. There are weapons. You have a gun: a six-shot revolver. Most of the barrels are empty. There is a spent shell casing still lodged inside, and a single live bullet ready to fire. You have a flashlight. It is a wind-up light (See the German Dynamo Flashlight for its real-world inspiration). It doesn’t need a power source beyond a few tugs of its string, but it doesn’t stay on for very long, before you’re back in darkness once again.
There is an exit, blocked off. The previous residents of the bunker had come up with a plan to blow it open. All they needed were sticks of dynamite and the plunger to activate them. Most of the bunker’s residents are gone. Some of the bunker’s residents still linger about, dead on the floor, meals for the rats that infest the place.
You can hear the war, still out there, on the surface. The sound of distant gunfire, the shaking of the earth when artillery shells crash nearby. Inside the bunker there is a different sound. Guttural. Strange. Not quite human. There is movement in the walls. Something is roaming the bunker, something monstrous, and slowly, but surely, it is becoming more and more aware that you are here, running about its corridors.
Amnesia: The Bunker behaves like a small-scale Alien: Isolation (2014). There is an invincible monster lurking about, crawling out of various holes. You can try to hide. You can try to run if that doesn’t work. The beast roams around at its own will, breaking down doors and whatever else gets in its way.
You could try to shoot the monster. It will not kill it, but it will buy you some time. Maybe a moment. Ammunition is extremely scarce, so depending on how many bullets you have left that might make for a costly purchase. In my own playthrough I never carried a full six bullets.
There is a strong emphasis on survival in this survival horror game, forcing you to think of alternative strategies to nearly every scenario, each with their own resource cost. Not sure how to get through a door? A grenade will make short work of it. A rat-infested corpse blocking the way? Why not pour out some gasoline and light it up with a flare.
You can turn on the lights. There is a backup generator, and a decent supply of fuel scattered throughout. While the lights are on the beast will mostly hide in the walls. Mostly. Like everything else, that fuel is just as much a limited resource as the bullets in your gun, the grenades in your pocket, the space in your pack. Start up the generator and it’ll burn through what you’ve poured in. You can even see the time run out with a stopwatch (which takes up its own space in your inventory). The lights don’t last quite as long as you’d like before you’re plunged back into darkness.
And then you ran back to safety. There is a safe room at the center of the bunker. It has locks on both entrances, strong enough to keep the creature out. There are no holes in the walls in this place. There is the lantern (for saving), the map (for plotting), and the generator (for bringing light to the darkness).
That is the flow of the game:
Use the map to figure out where you want to go. It’s a detailed map. It updates as you complete objectives. It is your best friend in your hope to escape the bunker.
Run out of your safe space and into the bunker. Explore its darkened corridors. Experiment with the little you have in the hopes that you might find something you need, whether it’s a passcode for a locker, or a pair of bolt cutters left behind and forgotten.
Escape back to the safe room. Run as fast as you can. It’s right behind you. It will kill you.
Run.
Run.
Run.
And then do it again. Plot out your next move into the bunker. Make just a little bit more progress. Hopefully you’ll escape.
Try not to make any noise. You might have to make noise, but until that moment it’s better not to be noticed. It’s here that the creature is at its most frightening. Not when you see it. Especially if there’s nothing you can do, your guns on empty and you’ve cornered yourself. Death in the game is just a fleeting moment that separates attempts.
The fear is in the possibility of the creature. The suspense and the tension that is always lingering as you roam the darkened halls of the bunker. That’s when this game is at its best, at its most frightening, when you enter a desolate hall, and you tug on the string of your dynamo flashlight, and you hear the movement in the walls, and you hope that the monster hasn’t noticed.
You stop moving. The flashlight is faint, but it quickly flickers off. There is more movement in the walls, until the movement shifts and the beast emerges from the wall to the room beside you. Do you hide, or do you run?
Reviewed on Xbox