Amnesia: The Bunker Reviews
Amnesia: The Bunker is genuinely scary, and its puzzles are fun to solve. Old-school survival-horror fans in particular will find a lot to like about the game. It randomizes certain elements in subsequent playthroughs to keep things interesting and that combined with its open-ended nature makes it the most replayable Amnesia game, even though it doesn't quite stick the landing like its predecessors. Luckily, Amnesia: The Bunker is a day one Xbox Game Pass game, so horror fans can brave its terrors for themselves without making any kind of major financial commitment.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a smaller, more self-contained episode in the groundbreaking horror franchise that shows Frictional still has some chilling, new tricks up their sleeves.
Amnesia: The Bunker corrects the missteps of its predecessors and adds in a sense of invention, creating a truly unsettling adventure.
Amnesia: The Bunker is an essential horror game and an inspired next step for the series.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a bold new direction for the series, and it chiefly pays off with brilliant scares and disempowerment of the player. The bottlenecked level design can be frustrating though, as can the nature of do-overs with the beast hot on your heels.
These moments rival those of the best stealth games, when the slightest noise can mean revealing your position to much more powerful foes. Frictional has made a name for itself by creating these moments out of elegant yet terrifying systems. The Bunker’s standout achievement, then, is creating a nonlinear sandbox where you’re constantly learning from your own bad habits. I’ve never been so conscious of how much noise everything makes around me in a digital space, cautiously entering rooms to avoid kicking an empty wine bottle or activating the flashlight intermittently when I knew the monster was near. As McKee described, it’s your mundane actions, in conjunction with the crude and hostile setting, that create a solid ceiling of sound — one that only grows thicker the longer you inhabit the bunker.
Frictional Games reinvigorates the series that made it famous with its scariest game in years.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a compact, focused and refreshing horror game that brings new excitement to one of horror's modern classic game series.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a heart stopping horror that constantly leaves you in fear, but it's all the better for it.
In its best moments, Amnesia: The Bunker joins Outlast and Alien: Isolation at the pinnacle of this style of horror, but this is a game with a split identity. Combat feels out of place and mostly ends up being a navigation tool, while I would have liked to see better use of light as a defence against the creature. The story is somewhat predictable, but Amnesia: The Bunker excels with its atmosphere and the kind of tense gameplay that will thrill genre fans.
The best Amnesia game since The Dark Descent and a welcome spiritual successor to Alien Isolation, that makes darkness more terrifying than any video game before it.
The craftmen of Frictional Games show again how well they know the horror genre. This might not be the most ground breaking game, but it offers a noteworthy survival experience.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Amnesia: The Bunker is a more guided experience than it claims, where ingenuity and improvisation are replaced by tedious resource management.
Review in Italian | Read full review
There are lots of ideas in Amnesia: The Bunker that are truly intriguing. I love the World War 1 setting as a backdrop for a horror story, especially the way it intersects with technology of the era. But the way gameplay elements are introduced as friction meant to induce tension simply feel overtuned. I often felt like I was fighting the game just to get around, which was frustrating in a software kind of way rather than an atmospheric enhancement. I wasn’t scared because I was too busy squinting or yanking on the flashlight’s pull cord just so I could pull on doors and latches. No amount of spooky ambiance in the background could bring me back into the experience.
Not even an intermittent crash or clunky load screen can minimize what Amnesia: The Bunker does so well. The intimate world, wonderfully interwoven mechanics, and semi-random nature make The Bunker a nerve-racking experience that’s a natural evolution of its landmark first entry. On a surface level, it’s still about creeping through a dimly lit hellhole and evading unspeakable horrors, but Frictional has spent the last decade advancing that formula to create the best version of it so far.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a pleasant step up from its predecessor Rebirth, but it all too often falls into the problem many horror games have - resource management and monstrous harassment are balanced in such a way as to inspire annoyance more readily than fear. For much of its campaign, The Bunker is an absorbingly gloomy experience with a nice sense of rhythm to its progress and an effective illusion of dynamism in both its monster and environment. This is somewhat offset by enforced backtracking, a piddling inventory, and an embarrassingly rubbish flashlight. If it had expanded its promising ideas and balanced its threat-to-tedium ratio better, this could have been a fantastic experience. But, y’know, it didn’t do that.
The terror and isolation you feel here is a devious construct you must outsmart to escape to the surface and makes this feel like a true horror game in the best of ways.
Amnesia: The Bunker is not for the faint of heart. Frictional Games courageously breaks free of its own formula to examine what truly gets the blood pumping and the brain racing, and the result is a challenging and nearly unmanageable combination of stress and fear. While it misses the mark somewhat with story and atmosphere, The Bunker makes up for it through engaging and one-of-a-kind gameplay, which stretches the limitations of the horror genre.
Amnesia: The Bunker lacks the story-telling and emotional heft of the previous games in the series. But, if you are in the mood for a scary and tense game of cat and mouse, this game will satisfy your needs.
Amnesia: The Bunker manages to be a challenging and unsettling experience without falling into the easy temptation of jumpscares or holding the player's hand too much. Whether you memorized the previous chapters or decided to give the Amnesia saga a chance for the first time, this game proves to be a new success achieved by Frictional Games and a satisfying experience for all survival horror lovers.
Review in Italian | Read full review