8/13/2023 0 Comments A hint of amnesia reed![]() These screenshots are press assets provided by Frictional, because when I fired the game up to take screens just now it was running in a weird potato quality that didn't represent what it actually looked like when I played it Near the start the game tells you that "if you think something seems possible, it probably is", but that's not quite true in practice, and I largely took advantage of the systems to open doors by throwing cinderblocks at them. You can interact with the environment a lot more than in previous Amnesia games, moving boxes and items around to find different ways of progressing. Even photographs you pick up can give you clues as to what's going on if you look closely enough at them. To figure out how to solve puzzles you just have to pay attention: there's a duplicate key in X soldier's bunk bed to get the mechanism when you need you have to open soldier Y's locker to open this door you need bolt cutters. There's no real HUD, there isn't a map you can pull up whenever you want, and learning the layout of the bunker is extremely helpful. The Bunker is also a lot more immersive sim-y in a way that's very refreshing after Rebirth. The sound design works really well in concert with this, as you're never quite sure if what you heard was the bunker bunkering, a distant war explosion, or something coming to peel the skin off your face. The appearances of the monster aren't scripted, either, so whether you decide to spend a painstaking amount of time quietly creeping around or a balls-to-the-wall explosion run will make a difference. It creates a great interplay between safety and danger, because even as you master parts of the bunker, if you don't keep an eye on your watch the lights could suddenly go out. Getting injured, for example, means you leave a blood trail. You'll still have to stay on your toes though. There's a slightly more forgiving story mode that starts you with a larger inventory, and lets you make more noise before the creature comes to attack. Your objective is always to find dynamite and a plunger to blast your way out of there, and you always come back to your safe room to fill up the generator, save, and play inventory Tetris. The Bunker is sort of a very focused Metroidvania in that you do not progress linearly to new areas, but instead gradually open up deeper and deeper areas of the bunker. You can find flares and grenades, med packs, and a critical resource is petrol, which you use to power a generator in a central area that becomes your mission hub. You start with a pistol, later scrounging up a shotgun - though bullets are few. Unlike before you have a few more tools at your disposal than running and hiding. Like before, it can pop up basically anywhere by using tunnels in the walls (placed in almost every room, just to give you the extra heebie jeebies), and like before you have to be aware of how much light there is around you because the creature has an aversion to it. This is when you take over, and discover that basically everyone else is dead at the hands - rather, the weird giant claws - of the unkillable beast that now lives in the bunker with you. ![]() The amnesia requirement is fulfilled by Henri waking up in a field hospital bed and not remembering any of what happened between the nearly-dying and the now. You play a soldier called Henri who is extremely nearly exploded in some trench warfare, landing him in the aforementioned extremely beige undergound complex. And what a bottle episode! You'll spend 4-6 hours being chased around the tunnels of a maze-like bunker, winding up a dim, rubbish torch and reading increasingly unhinged diary notes from the French soldiers who've all been eaten, and boy will you have a great time. ![]() Although, I suppose it actually is, because Rebirth is set in 1937, and Amnesia: The Bunker is effectively a bottle episode taking place during the First World War. More fool me for thinking the Amnesia story (a now-complex horror sci-fi epic about Cenobite-esque weirdos who gain immortality by drinking pain-milk extracted from people via torture at the hands of specially engineered torture-monsters) was done with Amnesia: Rebirth.
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