There’s always that feeling of being uneasy whenever I play a horror game. Playing Silent Hill for the first time got me unnerved to the core, especially with its haunting tunes and otherworldly fog. I never got that feeling with Frictional’s Amnesia games until I played The Bunker.
But for a quick history check, I’ve been obsessed with horrors since my teenage years. The first Amnesia wasn’t that scary, as I often associated it with PewDiePie and his YouTube shenanigans a few years ago. I just knew that whatever horrors came my way, Stefano and a couple of barrels would protect me. In Amnesia: The Bunker, however, I only had myself and an abominable beast terrorizing my every move as I’m stuck in an abandoned World War 1 bunker.
There’s just something about The Bunker that terrifies me to the core. Maybe it’s the claustrophobic hallways or the sheer hopelessness of the situation, or maybe it’s because of how it twists the familiar ‘stalker’ horror formula into new heights.
Normally, horror game stalkers don’t faze me. I’ve had my fair share of jump scares in old games like Slenderman and Five Nights and Freddy’s, but over time, they became mere pushovers as I know that these monsters are scripted by design. Known examples would have to be Resident Evil monsters like Mr. X and Lady Dimitrescu, where you can always feel them coming from a mile away.
In Amnesia: The Bunker, the Beast is the kind of stalker that just doesn’t know when to stop.
Like the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, The Beast can’t be killed. A gunshot to the head won’t stop it from gorging your insides, nor a well-timed explosion of a grenade. This Beast is relentless, but it is afraid of fire and avoids the light; however, in a game like Amnesia, you have to work your way to keep the lights intact.
Fueling generators and crafting torches are essential to stave off the Beast for a little while, but you can also use the Dynamo Flashlight as a quick light source; however, its loud mechanisms would only risk your safety.
It’s stuff like these that give me anxiety in a horror game, where I had to make tough choices like repairing a broken elevator or finding a door code while avoiding the bestial scourge that prowls the area. One simple mistake, like triggering a tripwire grenade, would invite the beast to you, and once you’re caught in its grasp, you’re gonna have to start all over from your safe zone.
The Beast is an unpredictable creature, which is why it’s scary. It shares a similar kind of advanced AI the Xenomorph had with Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation, and Frictional managed to step it up even further with how sensitive it is to sound and light.
There were moments that I genuinely didn’t want to go outside of the safehouse, fearing encountering the Beast. There was even one moment in the game where I backed myself into a corner with zero light sources and no generator fuel, so I had to push towards the objective as carefully as possible without alerting it.
Granted, the game can get predictable later on, but the Beast AI is still smart enough to trick you when you least expect it. If you felt like you were safe in one area, you’d be surprised to see it come crawling in a corner.
My time with Amnesia: The Bunker was intense. I even uninstalled and stopped playing it due to how terrifying it all was. Good thing I manned up, downloaded it again, and went through the nightmare and rolled the credits.
But that’s probably the last time I’d play The Bunker.
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