Why isn’t World War I used as a horror setting more? It’s so well suited to it.
Frictional Games understood how easily supernatural horror can be married to the more mundane (but no less appalling) horrors of war. That’s where Amnesia: The Bunker comes in.
Set in a bunker on the front line between the French and German armies in 1916, the player takes the role of Henri Clement, a soldier who, after being forced to retreat from attacking German soldiers while attempting to help a friend, is badly injured in an artillery strike and taken to a nearby bunker for recovery.
When he wakes up a few days later with amnesia of recent events (a product of head trauma rather than deliberation unlike the prior protagonists in the series), he finds that nearly everyone else is dead, and a badly savaged fellow soldier he meets begs Henri for the gift of mercy while handing him a revolver. Before Henri can do anything, the injured man is attacked by a creature that pulls him through a hole in the wall, leaving Henri with nothing else to do but run.
Trapped in the bunker, Henri must search for the tools to escape while being relentlessly hunted by the beast.
This is the 4th instalment in the Amnesia series, and Frictional’s seventh game (that they actively worked development on) overall.
As the studio that propelled the first person horror game into the mainstream, it’s encouraging to see that Frictional Games has learned the lessons of its successors; there’s more than a little influence from Alien: Isolation present.
In the first instalment, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, your only option for dealing with the entities you encountered was to run and hide.
In The Bunker you have more methods for dealing with your foe. Henri has a revolver, can find grenades, craft petrol bombs, and later on can find a shotgun, all of which can be used to fight off the creature.
However, not only are all your weapon resources extremely scarce (I found little more than a dozen revolver rounds over the game), you’re only buying time; the creature can’t be killed, just temporarily warded off. Repeated attacks against your hunter only make it angrier, more aggressive in its desire to end you.
Your doomed companions have fitted the bunker with tripwire explosives and other traps intended for the creature, but which can be tripped by you if you’re not careful. The rats which feast on the bodies of your comrades will try to devour you alive if you get too close.
The only sanctuary is the bunker’s administration room; this is the only location you can lock up fully, remaining safe from your foe. This is also where the generator is located, one of The Bunker’s most effective tools for maintaining tension and pacing.
This generator needs to be topped up with fuel, or else the bunker is plunged fully into darkness, giving the light-averse creature free rein to stalk its corridors. When the lights are running, it will only emerge to investigate loud noises.
Darkness ups the difficulty, and a part of your mind is always fixated on gathering more fuel for the generator as you make your way around.
Immersion is key to effective horror, which The Bunker understands; there’s no health bar, Henri can check his wounds, your only indicator for how close to death he is is how much blood stains his hand. Healing is performed on screen, as Henri bandages himself. You’ll want to stay healthy, as, the aforementioned flesh eating rats will be drawn to the scent of your blood, and actively follow the trails you leave when injured.
Similarly, how many of your few bullets are chambered is something that you have to check visually, as Henri opens the revolver’s cylinder. Reloading is slow, as Henri loads the revolver bullet by bullet on screen… not something you want to get backed into a corner doing while your malefactor barrels down the corridor towards you.
Another aspect to effective immersion is sound design. The claustrophobic confines of the bunker itself are emphasised by the hollow echoes of your footsteps, the skittering sound of rats feasting on the corpses of your unfortunate comrades provides an unsettling undertone, and the sounds of the beast itself moving in the walls and ceili ng is a dread that never quite leaves.
When you’re close enough to an explosion, your ears ring for a few seconds afterwards, and the report of your gunshots seems realistic rather than overdone, also resulting in ringing tinnitus.
Every so often, the entire bunker rumbles slightly and debris falls from the ceiling as artillery strikes overhead. The ambience goes a long way to sell the bleakness and horror of the setting.
The setting is well realised; though the bunker is large, it isn’t *huge*, but is well populated with denseness and detail; there’s something of the Metroidvania about it as your options for changing your approach are expanded by the gradually increasing amount of equipment and tools you pick up.
Something that many will consider a negative, though for my money I’d say it works, is the run time.
On Normal difficulty, the game isn’t going to last you much more than 4-10 hours, which stings less than it might with its £20 price tag on PS5.
That said, certain elements of the game are procedurally generated; locker codes and the location of a lot of items is different each playthrough, which is an aid to replayability.
Even then, a shorter, well-crafted experience is far more valuable than a sprawling but empty one.
There are too few horror games that place an emphasis on horror over action coming out, and with its reasonable price tag I’d recommend The Bunker to anyone who enjoyed the original, or any of the successors it inspired. Or really to anyone who enjoys survival horror in general.
