What happens when the fourth installment of a series that normally has no weapon combat and always a defenseless protagonist now decides to arm the protag up with weapons and make a genuine survival horror game? They knock it out of the fucking park.

Bunker is an incredible game, something like if Alien:Isolation and Monstrum had a baby, and that baby was sick as fuck and came out of the womb with a loaded revolver. A revolver also coincidentally being the main weapon of choice and your work horse throughout the game, a thing that will probably cover up 20% of your screen throughout the game on the right side, with the left side also being covered up 20% by your light, a light that you need to recharge every few seconds, makes you have less accuracy when aiming with your revolver, and also can alert the monster to your presence. You also get other lovely items like grenades, gas grenades, molotovs, gas masks, and also gas can, gas cans that are meant to refuel your generator, a generator you better make sure to keep constantly or else it’s lights out for you buddy. Lights out doesn’t mean you’re as lost as a blind child and makes the beast more aggressive; it also means you can’t complete certain tasks you need to do to accomplish your one singular goal throughout this game, find your way out of this hellhole of a bunker and make it into the even more hellish and deeper hole that the current war going outside, WW1 specifically.

A hellhole with company, that being the main monster of this game, aptly named “The Stalker”, he’ll stalk you around throughout this game, digging through the walls and hiding outside of holes, his heavy breathing being loud and apparent with you also occasionally getting a good glimpse of one of his claws coming out of his dark den, feeling around menacingly outside to check for anything while you’re shitting your pants in a corner asking yourself “That’s not a sign he’s about to come out, right?”. Luckily for you that doesn’t mean that, he always loves to instead announce his presence with a loud roar, ripping out of the wall and deciding to get up close and personal, hunting for you simply because it grew tired of not being able to hear you, or because you were too dumb enough to notice the bright red drawn X on a door with a grenade attached to the hinge to activate if you push it open, and now have something that looks like a mix between a gorilla, a rat, and a demonic WW1 soldier on your ass. That last one keeping well in line with most enemy designs of all previous Amnesia games, something that was once human now corrupted and tortured, becoming a monster and feeding off literal fear, and what better place to become such a beefcake and get such gains than the literal frontlines of WW1. Practically pure black eyes now devoid of emotion, a mangled mouth with one side of it having incredibly long protruding teeth, looking something like an angler fish or the mold enemies from Re7, plus something that almost looks like metal surrounding his chest, something you might get a close enough look to realize those are bayonets stabbed directly into him, yet he’s still going. The Stalker is a terrifying enemy, something that reminds me of the Alien from Alien Isolation, though comparing it to that isn’t really true nor is it fair. The Alien from that game had an incredibly impressive AI, an AI that would learn and adapt to your techniques as you went throughout the game trying to survive and escape. Use too many noisemakers and flares as a distraction? It starts to ignore them and not care about them at all. Use your flamethrower very liberally and chew up ammo a lot? It won’t attack you head on as much and will in fact approach you more slowly that might cause you to panic and try to wait for it to get as close as possible only for it to suddenly lunge and make you as dead as possible. The Stalker doesn’t have this sort of sophistication to his AI, though he does have a nice bonus of becoming more resistant to your attacks and sometimes won’t be as easy to scare off. Use your revolver and shoot him once to make him go away? Now you might have to use two since he’s gotten used to the pain. It’s nice, though not as impressive.

With an open map for you to explore, a stalking beast hunting you down intent on ripping your heart, weapons and items to use to survive and kill to your heart's content, what’s not to love? Well..a tiny bit, actually.

As much as I love this game and all the other Amnesia games, this one has its flaws, like the main story, that being that there barely is one, especially there being hardly anything for our main character. Henri doesn’t have much going on for him, no real development or anything like that, he’s kinda basic. We learn he does harbor a dark secret and did something that caused the main events of this game to happen, but this really is for the player, Henri himself doesn’t have any real reaction to realizing what he’s truly done after everything which rather sucks. He didn’t have such grand stakes as Daniel, Mandus, or Tasi, he just did something that caused a horrific chain of events to happen, and nothing interesting came of it afterwards. The most reaction we got from it is one note of his you read, something that you get early on and while does become shocking once you realize the context to it, still isn’t really enough I’d say. The best compliment I could give Henri is that if you asked the question of "Who would win a fight if all the protagonist in the Amnesia games fought?" I'd probably say Henri, considering his competition is a peasant science boy, a Victorian era widower who is a spoiled rich guy, and finally a pregnant woman (who can transform tbf), what does Henri have? A gun. Also, Henri doesn't have a sanity meter to handle unlike all the other games, so I like to think of that one meme about incomprehensible Eldritch horrors only for Henri to go "Actually, I can comprehend them pretty easily", Henri is simply built different. The game's story itself also has very minor stakes for the big picture in the Amnesia world, which y’know is fine, just something that should be pointed out and acknowledged.

Another problem is the engine that Amnesia uses, that every Amnesia game uses the HPL Engine, something made by Frictional themselves and was fine for everything else but has now started to get milked a bit dry and is now starting to show its age in The Bunker. Loading into the game every time results in some graphics not loading well, taking up to ten seconds for everything to get fixed and fully formed. Now, that’s a bit of nitpick and isn’t too major, especially since you’ll probably always load in at the same exact place, that being the safety of your safe room (unless you’re on easy mode and have multiple other lanterns for you to spawn around and save at, coward), which by the time you leave the room will have fixed itself by then. I do however find it silly that every single time I need to have the game transition into a new area it pauses itself for a couple seconds loading the next area, it’s slightly annoying every time, with the game doing this to do a pretty good job of keeping track of items in each area that you may have messed around with and keeping it where it was. Now that sounds like a good thing, right? Correct, if I make a mess in an area and come back there later, the mess should be the same, that’s fine, but it does it in the way of doing it too well, and since this is coming from someone who hasn’t designed a game in their entire life but will now explain it in my own way with the best way I can. To my understanding, it unloads the previous area you exited and freezes it, making sure everything stays the same as it reloads as you are now entering it, but what if I were to do something silly like oh, I don’t know, throw a grenade while in one area, and then proceed to immediately run into the next area. Sure, I’m in my new area but realistically I should still hear and feel my grenade going off behind me in the old area, shouldn’t I? Nope, instead nothing happens and the moment I go back into the old area, the grenade is now reactivated again and is about to explode and I only have a few seconds to run away before dying. It’s something that happened to me (sorta, I just didn’t die), and it really did give me more of an idea of how much they’re straining their engine. I respect it, sorta, but it also does make me concerned if they ever try to make an even more ambitious project than the Bunker.

Bugs are a tiny bit of a problem, things like seeing into the skybox if I angle myself right between two walls and can now see outside into the orangey abyss. Something like that isn’t totally bad, however, what is bad when I randomly die in my playthrough, a playthrough in which I was playing it on the very hardest difficulty and was right at the very end, and suddenly am now stuck in an endless loading screen that won’t let me back into my game no matter what I do and had to restart. Look, I love looking for an excuse to replay a game I love, but that shouldn’t be the case in that way.

One final complaint I’d give is how overly annoying the harder modes can be. I don’t mean anything about “I have less items wah” or “I have to save using gasoline now wah wah” like idc, I’ve beaten this game several times, hell one time I beat the game on Hard without using the generator at all besides when I was forced to complete tasks. What I find annoying is how overly aggressive and stubborn the monster can be, I hate hiding under a desk for 5 minutes waiting for it to go away, to then finally hear the sound of it crawling into a hole, only to then hear it immediately come out of a hole not even 2 seconds later because it’s a prissy bitch and is upset that it hasn’t gotten it’s meal yet and is now making it my problem to make me wait even longer before I can play the game again.

But to just end it here, I still absolutely love the game, it’s rough around the edges and isn’t perfect, but it’s done so well and so fun that it’s hard to hate completely. It also has a randomly generated map for its items, allowing you to replay the game a lot which makes it more fun, and I really enjoy that. It has tons of fun set pieces as well, like the pillbox you get into to find a code, seeing the wide-open land ahead of you and letting you think you might be able to now be free, only for a sniper to suddenly start taking shots as you, shots that will kill you if hang around long enough. There are so many moments that left me terrified or in awe and I’m happy to see Amnesia make such a different change in their approach to game design and knock it out of the park.