This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Amnesia: The Bunker. (Also, our exclusive, limited-edition Adventure Is Nigh! dice are on sale now at Dice Envy! Buy them while you can!)
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Zero Punctuation Transcript
I’ll say this for the Amnesia franchise – it’s certainly one to remember. Counter-intuitively. Let’s see how much we can milk out of THAT joke. Frictional Games’ tentpole franchise that is in my view like your mum’s unsecured water bed because it’s gone quite severely up and down a few times. The first game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a landmark in video game horror, the second one, Machine for Pigs, less so ‘cos it forgot to have much in the way of gameplay mechanics, probably because of all that amnesia that was going around – woo! Two points! – the most recent one, Rebirth, was back on track but misstepped a little for me by taking the lid off the mysterious nature of the underlying horror a bit too much, it’s hard to still be intimidated by Cthulhu after you’ve seen him bumbling around the house in his bathrobe and underpants. But the basic formula for the games has never changed – you’re a twat who wakes up with no memory and no face, you embark upon a journey through horror mainly leading in a downward direction – or “dark descent” if you will – before finding out the horror was you the whole time, why do you suck so much you gormless no-faced bellend. Amnesia: The Bunker is trying an interesting new spin on things because while you are a gormless no-faced bellend and you do have to make dark descents, you then have to repeatedly un-descend back to the starting room, slam the door and go “For Christ’s sake, why do I never sodding learn?!”
Or more accurately “Mon dieu, pourquoi est-ce que je n’apprends sodding jamais,” because you’re a French soldier in the first world war who gets knocked out and wakes up in an underground survival bunker where everyone else has been wiped out by something with big teeth and a world-class nark on. And as you explore the cramped tunnels by the light of a flashlight that can illuminate as well as two glow in the dark Thundercats stickers on a pencilcase, you too will be gripped by a sense of visceral horror as you cry, “Jesus Christ, Frictional, are you still using the engine from the first game? Those rats all animate like upturned gravy boats on roller skates.” Oh, but I’d be a hypocrite to pick on a game for not trying to painfully milk every last jagged pixel out of the graphics card, there’s not much spectacle that can be injected into cramped underground tunnels with a colour spectrum ranging all the way from potting soil to human excrement, and it’d be wasted effort anyway ‘cos you’d need to be able to see more than three square yards of it at a time. The whole game’s lit like the underside of a bed in a low budget whorehouse.
In contrast to the poorly illuminated declinations of previous games that were usually linear strings of locations and curated set pieces trying to pick the right moments to get your underpants to the far end of the spectrum as it were, The Bunker is more of an open ended immersive sim affair with organically generated gameplay. You start out in the game’s one safe room in the centre of the labyrinthine bunker which is the only place with a save point, and must venture out on expeditions to the distant corners of the map to hunt the short list of key items required to escape the bunker. The complication is that there’s something else down here, something creeping around inside the walls. You’ll never know what it is or where it is, but what you DO know is that running into it is a matter of “when” rather than “if.” You also can’t kill it and it wants to use your superior pubic ligament as dental floss. Gosh, you know what, game, I could leave the saferoom but it’s pretty homey once you get used to it. I had a look at the bunker exit you wanted me to open and by the sounds of it the French and German armies are still pretty occupied with each other out there, I’d hate to distract them from their fun with my trivial bullshit OH GOD DON’T MAKE ME GO DOWN THERE AGAIN THERE’S A GIANT KILLER WEETABIX
What I’m trying to say is, The Bunker made me unnerved in ways Amnesia hasn’t managed since the first game, in spite or perhaps because of its simplicity. We might be in yet another cramped brown room but when something’s lolloping past the door and I’m trying to hold perfectly still in the darkness, silently praying it’ll forget about me, possibly because of amnesia, three points, my underpants are no cleaner for their lower polygon count. The Bunker uses its core mechanics like a well-conducted three-piece band. Between a severely limited inventory, the knowledge that death will undo everything you achieved since your last toilet stop in the saferoom and the ticking clock of the generator gradually running out of fuel so if you don’t hurry up you’ll have to try to get home with your loud wind-up flashlight that might as well be making the sound of a wounded gazelle as the only reason you’re not blindly groping your way around pitch darkness and potentially a set of affronted monster titties, makes for a very effective atmosphere of constant pressure and stress. That means I have to top up the generator, neatly rearrange the storage box and click the save button a minimum six or seven times before I can summon the courage to leave again.
But with time and experience you start figuring out the best strategies. “Try anything! It’ll probably work!” is the immersive sim-style opening boast. And I got into the spirit of that. For example, I left all the fuel cans I found on the floor of the generator room instead of using up the limited space in the saferoom storage box, and that worked, but I don’t think it was precisely what the game had in mind. What “try anything” means is what it usually means – you can stack crates and break open wooden doors. Oh, that reminds me: you’re probably conditioned to overlook loose bricks as mere set dressing but try to unlearn that. Bricks in this game, or as I prefer to call them, master keys, are worth their weight in prime stallion spunk. But there are plenty of doors that can’t be bashed open and are rigidly gated by hunts for very specific keys and inventory items, ‘cos the game wouldn’t be able to pace things properly or force you on bullshit scavenger hunts through the monster discotheque if you could just brick your way through everything, so the promise of rewarding experimentation and lateral thinking doesn’t hold up very well. And I can’t say the game benefits much from its procedurally generated elements, either.
The layout of the bunker and the pivotal inventory puzzles don’t change, it’s just the traps and optional pickups. And I assume it’s the reason I was three quarters through my playthrough before I found a cigarette lighter, which is the only way to use about half your defensive options. I had molotovs for days. I’d been crafting molotovs since moment one. But without a lighter all I could do was hold them up like I was proposing a cocking toast. So when you do escape the bunker and the game goes “Congratulations on finishing your FIRST playthrough!” I could only reply “I wish I had your optimism, Amnesia: The Bunker. But I just spent four hours trying to get out of that sodding place. This isn’t like the ending of Count of Monte Cristo where the dude realises he’s changed too much to resume his old life and runs back to his new giant monster Weetabix girlfriend. There’s probably story stuff I missed, I never found the thing that explains how the protagonist was the real monster or the monster was our old college roommate or whatever the twist they set up this time was, but shifting a few molotov ingredients around couldn’t make it worth a second punt right away. Still, it’s an effective and absorbing game while it lasts, and created plenty of moments that will stay in my memory. Ironically. Boom, four points.
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
