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dkirschner's Amnesia: The Bunker (PC)
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| [June 24, 2023 02:01:00 PM]
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I did not like this at all. It pales compared to the best Amnesia games and to Alien: Isolation, from which it takes clear inspiration. You are a French soldier trapped in a bunker in WWI. Pretty much everything else is dead down there. Oh, except for a hulking monster that murdered everyone and relentlessly stalks you. It sounds cool! In practice, I found most everything that was supposed to be scary about the game irritating instead. Once you get out of the "tutorial" area of the map, you can head in one of four directions, exploring the bunker and collecting what you need, and solving required puzzles in order to escape. After the tutorial, the monster activates, and boy does it. Everything seemingly triggers it to come looking for you and it looks for a long time. I spent a lot of my partial playthrough sitting in the dark waiting for it to go away. It moves through the walls, emerges from holes, and can break down doors. It feels like it teleports to wherever you are after you perform basic actions like running or cranking your flashlight.
This is all kind of fine though, right? It's a survival horror game. The monster is supposed to stalk you. Of course it's attracted to noise. Well, yeah, but it's so ever-present that the cat-and-mouse game feels less like any battle of wits (you can't "outsmart" the monster), but rather a waiting game. Cat-and-hide-in-a-corner-for-5-minutes. And chances are, after 5 minutes of hiding, the monster will magically detect you in the corner, break down the door you carefully locked, and kill you anyway. Then it's back to the Administration Room when you last saved.
You will HAVE to crank your flashlight; making noise is unavoidable. Typically, though, you want to fill the generator with gasoline so the lights in the bunker come on. The generator guzzles the gas, and you have a handy pocketwatch that you can sync to tell you how much time is left till the gas runs out. But you'll still need to crank that flashlight to illuminate where lights don't shine. And when the generator runs out, the only light you've got is the flashlight, which only lasts like 30 seconds on a crank. So, as with Amnesia: Rebirth, much of The Bunker is spent squinting in the darkness trying to open doors. The Bunker to me was less about avoiding a scary monster and more about navigating a maze of locked doors with a stupid flashlight that I have to crank every 30 seconds. It just so happens that the monster slows my progress through the maze to a snail's pace, what with all the stopping and waiting under tables.
The monster, the darkness, they're not scary! They don't build tension. They're annoying!
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dkirschner's Amnesia: The Bunker (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated
GameLog started on: Sunday 11 June, 2023
GameLog closed on: Saturday 24 June, 2023 |
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