Amnesia: The Bunker Reviews
Amnesia: The Bunker is the series' lowest point, and doesn't give an indication for a hopeful future.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a step down from Amnesia: Rebirth. New release from Frictional Games is visually boring, lacks atmosphere and can get on your nerves with constantly teleporting stalker enemy.
Review in Russian | Read full review
While the classic Amnesia gameplay is available here in a lot of ways, it’s mixed with some underwhelming, poorly balanced monster gameplay that doesn’t work as well as it should.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a well-designed, short sharp episode in the award-winning horror series. The setting is suitably tense, the new inventory management and puzzle-solving philosophy feeds into the suspense, along with the limited resources, and the multiple endings do add replayability. Short length and some interactivity issues aside, this is another memorable Amnesia game and one of the best to date.
Amnesia: The Bunker has all these little pieces that work well, but doesn’t fully deliver on its main hook. Fans of the series may be set up for a No Man’s Land of disappointment, where just a few tweaks here and there might make it a much more enjoyable experience. With it also launching on Xbox Game Pass, that might be the best place for it to gain an audience.
Frictional should be commended for at least trying something a bit different when compared to their previous offerings. As the studio continued to evolve and iterate on their linear experiences, there is a hope that they will continue to learn and iterate on this idea of a semi-open world horror experience. Perhaps in a few years' time we will see Frictional create a title that again hits the highs of Soma but with the added freedom to explore and experiment in the game world. It would be nice to look back in a few years at The Bunker as being a steppingstone to something greater, but right now it's hard to see it as anything other than a short, "merely ok" game from a studio that has crafted much more compelling releases in the past.
Amnesia is not a flagship of the genre. It doesn't pretend to be, and it doesn't even try to revolutionise the genre or its franchise. It evolves a little in its content and structure, but retains the same strength. Its job is to scare you for a few hours by immersing you in its world, and it succeeds perfectly. The Alien Isolation-style beast that stalks you incessantly makes you break out in a cold sweat, and the game is gripping. You'll simply have to get used to the decade-old gameplay. The problem is that it can also put some people off.
Review in French | Read full review
Experimenting will more often reveal methods that do not work rather than validating the loading screen’s impossibly lofty claim to player freedom. Further, the resource scarcity that drives the game is hardly conducive to experimentation, doing more to keep you strictly on the path of least resistance. What motive is there to waste a precious gas can on some hare-brained scheme when you know for sure that it will work just fine in the generator? Certainly the more restrictive means of progression in The Bunker has its own pleasures even within a more open framework, but the game insists on calling a shot that it has no hope of making.
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.
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.
The best way I think I can describe The Bunker is that it is an exceptional proof of concept. There's immense potential here, and the first couple of hours or so are genuinely great horror, but the game doesn't have enough tricks up its sleeve to maintain momentum.
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
The new from Frictional Games is not capable of surpassing the barriers of games like The Dark Descent or Rebirth. However, it is still a good opportunity to understand and enjoy different readings of the same formula.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Easily the weakest game in the series.
Amnesia: The Bunker is not a game that you should skip, especially those of you who are fans of the genre, without this meaning that it will offer something innovative, as The Dark Descent
Review in Greek | Read full review
Amnesia: The Bunker is, in its scope compared to the other titles of the series, a smaller experimental title, but it offers a few new neat tricks. It's up to you whether that's enough or not.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
The Bunker is a great addition to the Amnesia series and shows that Frictional Games is on the right path, and even though it doesn't offer as much quality as the very first game, it's still an atmospheric survival horror and is the best in the genre this year.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Amnesia: The Bunker sticks a little too close to what Frictional Games has been doing for over a decade now, but with a more free-form approach to gameplay, the team is back on the right track again. Coupled with an excellent setting, Amnesia: The Bunker represents a vast improvement over its predecessor. You'll still encounter the same stumbling blocks of old, but this horror experience comes recommended.
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.