From the humble beginnings of Penumbra, smash cutting to the genre staple (for better or worse) of Amnesia, here we are circa twenty-twenty free, and Frictional Games has blown its load on us yet again with another one of these games. There’s a catch though, this game? Nothing like the other ones, it prides itself on its mechanics rather than decrying them.
For the legacy of something to be turned on its head like this with such resounding success is nigh unheard of. No aversion to walking sims here, they have their place, but after having played some of these it became… trite? Is that the right word? We can run with it. The staple of games like Outlast, centered around hide-and-seek, where systems weren’t the priority, and a lot of the story was told through flavor text, it was kind of due for change.
Change indeed there was. This game is like a wok of stir fry of the best the genre has to offer. And it’s short, yet highly replay-able. Locker combinations, item placements, spawns for both the beast and the scurry of rats, all of them shift around every time you play, so it’s always fresh. Welcome when similar games waste the big bad boys on scripted action sequences where you have to hold up on the controller for ten minutes straight… why did you ruin RE3 Capcom?
Some of this leaves room for more emergent design too. And that’s the kicker, this game treads on being an immersive sim. It doesn’t quite get there, but it does enough that the game allows you to fuck around and find out, literally. While some of the conventions you come to find in these sorts of games is here too, it’s done succinctly and with purpose. A lot of the details you uncover as events play out always lead you somewhere else and it always feels rewarding.
While the titular lead Henri Clément wakes up in delirium from an acute brain injury he sustained not too long before the events of the game, (you can probably guess from the title), a lot of details he would’ve known before are slowly stripped back; bunk mates and some of the trifles faced on a regular basis, arrangements between superior parties, hooliganism, and the odd mystery, all lies in wake for you and Henri to uncover at the same time, which if you let the game get its grip on you, will have you easily invested.
Supplementing this is how much the game plays itself straight. Everything you do is done methodically. From applying dressing on wounds, loading each individual round into your revolver’s cylinder or chambering shells into your shotgun, to selecting items from the good ol’ sachet to interact with foreign elements, painstaking care went into making everything you do considered, no matter how trivial. Just shy of having to rub whale oil on your blistered feet does this game feel like an eerily authentic emulation of the WWI experience.
Do you waste the one round you have on some padlock that could have some loot inside, or do you come back later once you’ve gotten the access for the bolt cutters? Do you waste the one fuel canister you have to have a few minutes of light to spare, or do you B-line it straight to the next objective in pitch blackness, with the loud cranking and limited lighting of your flashlight? There are lots of things to think about as you play and it makes for a thrilling and tense back-and-forth. Some of the options afforded to you have their pros and their cons, and it’s up to you which suits you best.
It might sound tedious, and I ain’t gonna lie, it is, but it’s part of the vision and it’s up to you whether you fuck with it or not. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, bless Godd Howard. It’s kind of like the whole thing with RDRII. It’s not a bad thing that there’s a process to skinning animals or picking plants, it’s just part of the game and you just put up with it or shut up about it. There is still plenty of fun to be had, at least engagement which I know would make some people scoff at the sound of.
Presumably done with deliberation too, at the time of writing we’re coming up on an update tailored for the Halloween season. In a way that feels like an indirect response to the feedback on SOMA’s Safe Mode, the game is getting Shell Shocked mode, which makes the game even more punishing than it already is. Why there are difficulty options when they don’t make much of a difference to begin with? For the fuck of it I suppose.
Amnesia: The Bunker is survival horror BLISS! Inventory management with artificial scarcity for resources, considering the best approach for every situation, experimenting with things that almost always turn out viable, it’s the whole package. Those games from the days of old, I can take or leave more of ‘em, but more of this please, this is good.
For fun, the game statistics for finishing on my first play-through:
Difficulty mode: Hard
Time played: 08:20:10
Longest time between saves: 00:16:57
Times saved: 41
Number of deaths: 9
Rats killed: 15
Bullets fired: 13
Shotgun shells fired: 6
Grenades thrown: 15
Gas grenades thrown: 9
Petrol bombs thrown: 26
Flares thrown: 7
Health items used: 13
Generator refills: 28
Blackouts: 3
Traps triggered: 13
Corpses burnt: 10
Fires started: 3
Doors destroyed: 15
Times spotted by stalker: 32
Items crafted: 42
Stalker bullet hit count: 9
Rats scared by torch: 5
For the legacy of something to be turned on its head like this with such resounding success is nigh unheard of. No aversion to walking sims here, they have their place, but after having played some of these it became… trite? Is that the right word? We can run with it. The staple of games like Outlast, centered around hide-and-seek, where systems weren’t the priority, and a lot of the story was told through flavor text, it was kind of due for change.
Change indeed there was. This game is like a wok of stir fry of the best the genre has to offer. And it’s short, yet highly replay-able. Locker combinations, item placements, spawns for both the beast and the scurry of rats, all of them shift around every time you play, so it’s always fresh. Welcome when similar games waste the big bad boys on scripted action sequences where you have to hold up on the controller for ten minutes straight… why did you ruin RE3 Capcom?
Some of this leaves room for more emergent design too. And that’s the kicker, this game treads on being an immersive sim. It doesn’t quite get there, but it does enough that the game allows you to fuck around and find out, literally. While some of the conventions you come to find in these sorts of games is here too, it’s done succinctly and with purpose. A lot of the details you uncover as events play out always lead you somewhere else and it always feels rewarding.
While the titular lead Henri Clément wakes up in delirium from an acute brain injury he sustained not too long before the events of the game, (you can probably guess from the title), a lot of details he would’ve known before are slowly stripped back; bunk mates and some of the trifles faced on a regular basis, arrangements between superior parties, hooliganism, and the odd mystery, all lies in wake for you and Henri to uncover at the same time, which if you let the game get its grip on you, will have you easily invested.
Supplementing this is how much the game plays itself straight. Everything you do is done methodically. From applying dressing on wounds, loading each individual round into your revolver’s cylinder or chambering shells into your shotgun, to selecting items from the good ol’ sachet to interact with foreign elements, painstaking care went into making everything you do considered, no matter how trivial. Just shy of having to rub whale oil on your blistered feet does this game feel like an eerily authentic emulation of the WWI experience.
Do you waste the one round you have on some padlock that could have some loot inside, or do you come back later once you’ve gotten the access for the bolt cutters? Do you waste the one fuel canister you have to have a few minutes of light to spare, or do you B-line it straight to the next objective in pitch blackness, with the loud cranking and limited lighting of your flashlight? There are lots of things to think about as you play and it makes for a thrilling and tense back-and-forth. Some of the options afforded to you have their pros and their cons, and it’s up to you which suits you best.
It might sound tedious, and I ain’t gonna lie, it is, but it’s part of the vision and it’s up to you whether you fuck with it or not. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, bless Godd Howard. It’s kind of like the whole thing with RDRII. It’s not a bad thing that there’s a process to skinning animals or picking plants, it’s just part of the game and you just put up with it or shut up about it. There is still plenty of fun to be had, at least engagement which I know would make some people scoff at the sound of.
Presumably done with deliberation too, at the time of writing we’re coming up on an update tailored for the Halloween season. In a way that feels like an indirect response to the feedback on SOMA’s Safe Mode, the game is getting Shell Shocked mode, which makes the game even more punishing than it already is. Why there are difficulty options when they don’t make much of a difference to begin with? For the fuck of it I suppose.
Amnesia: The Bunker is survival horror BLISS! Inventory management with artificial scarcity for resources, considering the best approach for every situation, experimenting with things that almost always turn out viable, it’s the whole package. Those games from the days of old, I can take or leave more of ‘em, but more of this please, this is good.
For fun, the game statistics for finishing on my first play-through:
Difficulty mode: Hard
Time played: 08:20:10
Longest time between saves: 00:16:57
Times saved: 41
Number of deaths: 9
Rats killed: 15
Bullets fired: 13
Shotgun shells fired: 6
Grenades thrown: 15
Gas grenades thrown: 9
Petrol bombs thrown: 26
Flares thrown: 7
Health items used: 13
Generator refills: 28
Blackouts: 3
Traps triggered: 13
Corpses burnt: 10
Fires started: 3
Doors destroyed: 15
Times spotted by stalker: 32
Items crafted: 42
Stalker bullet hit count: 9
Rats scared by torch: 5