Video Game / Amnesia: The Bunker

"To survive this war, you'll need two things: First, a basic set of skills. Second, the good god damned sense to do whatever's necessary.
I can teach you the first. The second is up to you."

—Romain Delpy, General de brigade, 4th army of the Third Republic

Amnesia: The Bunker is the fourth installment of Frictional Games' Survival Horror franchise Amnesia, being both developed and published by the same studio. Initially planned for release on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS4 and PC in May 15th, 2023, the game was delayed and eventually released on June 6, 2023. A demo of the game was released on May 23, 2023.

In contrast to all previous games, this one offers players the option to fight back against threats, more specifically through a revolver whose ammo is very scarce in the area, forcing them to scavenge across the bunker for more along with other supplies. Another standout is the fact that the game takes place in a non-linear open world, allowing free movement to most areas across the bunker at any time once unlocked. By the same token, the monster is fully unscripted, unlike opponents in previous Amnesia games, and wanders the Bunker at random responding to the player's actions similar to the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation.

Set in a desolate World War I bunker, it follows the story of Henri Clément, a French soldier trapped inside the titular location. Armed only with a revolver and a noisy dynamo flashlight, Henri has to explore the dark corridors of the abandoned bunker and find a way out, before its mysteries get to him first.

But mostly, he finds nothing...

Previews: Announcement Trailer, Gameplay Clip 1, Gameplay Clip 2, Gameplay Clip 3, Teaser Trailer, Gas Grenade Gameplay, Traps Showcase, Monster Encounter Clip, Trench Clip, Story Trailer, Alerting the Monster Clip, 10 Minutes of Gameplay, 3 Key Aspects.

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This game contains examples of:

• Abandoned Area: The bunker is clearly no longer operational by the time of the game, apparently only containing Henri, monstrous rats, and the mysterious Beast that dwells inside it.
• Actionized Sequel: Downplayed. It is the first Amnesia game with an equippable firearm and grenades, but the amount of ammo to be found can make the player think twice if a combat scenario is preferable (in a single playthrough it's likely you'll only find less than a dozen bullets in total, and even if you're a completionist and search every inch of the bunker you'll only find about 20 in total). The game's announcement trailer even shows Henri walking around with only one bullet in his revolver.
• Action Prologue: The beginning of the game has Henri making a frantic run through some trenches while gunning down German soldiers trying to kill him.
• Action Survivor: A downplayed example. Henri is a soldier trapped in a bunker fraught with abominations, which are often avoided instead of outright fought due to his lack of supplies.
• All There in the Manual: A pair of journal entries strongly hint where the monster came from, but the game never explains exactly why it became what it is now, and this information isn't central to the game's plot, which is simply to escape the bunker alive. You'd need to have played Amnesia: Rebirth to realize that the pool of water in the crater was poisoned with some variant of Tihana's Harvester mutagen, and Henri inadvertently infected Lambert when he gave him a drink of it in the prologue.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The map for each sub-area of the Bunker is shaded out on the map in Administration, requiring Henri to examine a smaller sub-map in the office of each sector to colour it in. These doors are often fully locked and require Henri to open them via explosives or bricks, which will inevitably attract the Beast. However, these offices almost always have a brick nearby to easily open them, and are always at the entrance to each sector.
  • The game offers a lot of affordances to your pistol that it does with no other inventory item. Its ammo is kept in its own slot. The pistol is a one-handed item, allowing you to use it alongside your flashlight, and Henri will always keep his aim extremely steady whenever he has it at the ready.
• Anvil on Head: Rats can be killed by dropping heavy objects on them from a height. The rat swarm in Arsenal Storage can be killed in this way, as there's a barrel conveniently placed on a shelf above them.
• Artifact Title: Yes, according to the bunker's doctor, Henri does have some memory loss due to head trauma from taking a shell to the face. However, he hasn't forgotten any particular Dark Secret or anything critical to the plot. Thus, the game being named Amnesia is much less meaningful for him than it is for Daniel, Mandus, or Tasi. Just about the only way in which Henri's memory loss is at all relevant is the fact he doesn't remember the code to his locker and has to find his dog tags to learn it.
• Artistic License – Military: Shotguns were mainly used by special American troops during World War 1 when they entered the war in 1917, so having a French soldier wield a Model 1897 in 1916 as well as having shotgun shells around the bunker would be impossible.
  • Henri wielding a revolver in the intro is inaccurate as regular infantrymen were not given handguns and were meant for officers instead.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: The Beast can easily smash apart wooden doors while searching or actively pursuing Henri. This conveniently can be used to trick it into opening doors for you that are otherwise inaccessible. Henri can do likewise, but needs help in the form of explosives, bricks, or the shotgun.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Early in the game, Henri comes across a mortally wounded soldier who asks him to finish him off, preferring to die at the hands of a fellow soldier rather than meet a gruesome end from the Beast. Unfortunately, the Beast gets to him anyway, regardless of how fast you are.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Constantly finding mutilated corpses is one thing in this series, but the chapel near the end of the game that The Beast converted into a shrine of sorts has corpses that look straight out of Event Horizon.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Regardless of if you kill the Beast or not, the game ends with Henri tumbling into a shell crater just as a German patrol begins to approach him.
• Building of Adventure: The bunker is a mysterious place harboring horrific creatures in its corridors, and finding a way out is the player's main goal.
• Chekhov's Gun: It doesn't come up until later in the game (and is only discovered via two journal entries), but Henri's canteen was filled with water taken from the spring found in the Roman tunnels. That very same spring contains the Harvester mutagen. In other words, Henri inadvertently made Lambert into the Beast.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The prisoner tied up in the cell has a pair of wirecutters on a bloody table next to him, and the bunker's commanding officer has a box with a handful of human fingers in it inside his closet...
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: The Beast, to the other monsters in the previous games. The Gatherers, Manpigs, and Harvesters were only ever a true threat to the protagonists because they were unarmed and isolated, not to mention working with hardly any resources, and usually appeared as part of scripted events. The Beast, on the other hand, is a more serious threat in comparison, especially since while Henri has access to more resources and even a gun by virtue of being trapped inside a trench bunker, it shrugs off the bullets and grenades like they're nothing and reacts to Henri's actions, such as when he makes loud noises. The Beast is also a former human, but while the previous monsters were intentionally made into the abominations they are, the Beast was created by pure accident.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Unlike previous Amnesia protagonists, who were Action Survivor types incapable of meaningful combat, Henri is a trained soldier, and the game's prologue even has a brief shootout in which he can kill 3 German riflemen with his revolver. He's still vastly outmatched by the Beast waiting for him inside the bunker, however.
• Cower Power: No longer always necessary this time around, but still the most efficient way to survive, as supplies, especially ammo, are rare and must be preserved for more tense or complex situations.
• Deadly Gas: In addition to frag grenades, you also can find gas grenades around the bunker. These can be used to drive off the Beast, block off an area from it, or scatter a group of rats. However the gas is also deadly to you, so you need a gas mask to walk through it safely.
• Developer's Foresight: At the start of the game, a dying Boisrond gives Henri his revolver and begs him to deliver a Mercy Kill, but the ammo for it is in the nearby pantry. Unfortunately, as soon as you get back the Beast will always pull him into the hole before you can fulfill his wish. If you think you can avoid the trigger by shooting at Boisrond from a distance, the Beast immediately attacks as soon as you take aim and kill him preemtively.
• Diesel Punk: The game has an approach similar to Rebirth's, as both take place in areas built, explored, or repurposed early in the 20th century, here occurring at a French bunker from World War I.
• Dirty Coward: The bunker's officers were the first to flee when the Beast started attacking and blew the exit of the bunker shut, trapping the rest of their men inside with the Beast.
• Disney Villain Death: Henri can deal with the Beast permanently in the Roman ruins at the end of the game by destroying one of the wooden walkways as it crosses it, plunging the Beast into the abyss below. However, it is not a requirement to finish the game.
• Doppelgänger Attack: In the ancient Roman tunnels there's an area filled with thick fog with shadowy human "ghosts" wandering around. These shadows make the area confusing because there's a very real human soldier also in the area, who you need to fight or stealth around, and in the thick fog it can be hard to tell the shadows apart from the real threat. If you happen to have a gas mask with you and wear it, the shadows will not appear.
• Downer Ending: Regardless if the monster is alive or not, Henri manages to escape the bunker, but there are enemy German soldiers who spotted him crawling out of the hole he came out of and are closing in on him. If the monster survives, it’s heavily implied it will slaughter all of the soldiers and Henri.
• Draw Aggro: Taking a page from Alien: Isolation (which itself took inspiration from Amnesia) the Beast can move through small holes in the walls and tunnels running throughout the bunker. Making too much noise risks attracting the attention of the monster, which can be a challenge because Henri might need to do something loud like detonating a grenade or Shoot Out the Lock to overcome obstacles.
• Dug Too Deep: The bunker the game takes place in was engaged in excavating some Roman ruins that they had dug into while tunneling out the bunker. Fairly early in the game, you find a journal from an archeologically educated soldier revealing that the Roman ruins actually belong to a pre-Roman human cult, and are heavily implied to contain one of the portals to Tihana's world, with the cult seeking immortality through Vitae.
• Early Game Hell: Your initial experiences within the bunker will be less than stellar. With your starting supplies limited to just a revolver, the flashlight, and the stopwatch, there are a lot of places you can go to, only to be beset by obstacles of one sort or another which will cost you precious time and fuel. Subsequent runs will give you a better understanding of where everything is, how to make progress, and how the Beast works, but even on those runs you're still starting from square one, lacking any additional tools until you find or craft them.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: Finishing the game with the Beast still alive is way more difficult than just killing it in the final confrontation. Killing the Beast just requires you to raise, block off, or destroy enough bridges so it's forced to jump across a broken bridge to get to you, at which point you can just shotgun it while it tries to climb up the ledge, or even easier you can distract it with the rabbit then destroy the bridge it's standing on with a single grenade or shotgun blast. Escaping the Beast, on the other hand, requires a complex cat-and-mouse dance across the maze of bridges in order to delay the Beast long enough to give you time to move some crates around so you can jump over the wall blocking the way to the exit. Killing the Beast just requires 1 shotgun shell and a couple of grenades or extra shotgun shells, which you can find in the tunnels where you get the shotgun or in Lambert's locker, while delaying it so you can escape without killing it will likely require you to have saved up a decent stockpile of ammo and resources.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: Whatever happened to the bunker, in the end, it certainly did not offer safety to its inhabitants.
• Harder Than Hard: The Halloween Update added a new "Shell Shock" difficulty for those looking for a true test of their survival skills. Among other things, this new difficulty disables Menu Time Lockout, takes away your revolver and places it in one of the padlock lockers and replaces the sturdy metal doors of your safe room with brittle wooden ones.
• Heroic Mime: Somewhat Downplayed, but outside of the prologue and journal entries he wrote, Henri never speaks, with the most he vocalises being grunts.
• Immersive Sim: Puzzle solutions are based around systems, rules, and physics rather than specific items. Instead of requiring a specific key item to open a door or get rid of a rat swarm, the player is free to come up with a number of working solutions based on the rules of the game world (wood catches fire, rats hate light, heavy objects smash lighter objects, explosions destroy anything you'd expect them to, etc).
• Immune to Bullets: While the Beast can be chased away with gunshots, it doesn't appear that they can actually kill the Beast for good as it will eventually return to take revenge. Though this could just be because most of the soldiers in the bunker were only armed with small-caliber revolvers. The shotgun is similarly ineffective.
• Interface Spoiler: It is possible to pick up shotgun shells long before seeing the shotgun, which requires either both the wrench and boltcutters to access or getting lucky with a dog tag code.
• Invincible Boogeyman: Zig-zagged unlike previous examples in the Amnesia series. The Beast can't be killed until the final confrontation, but it will retreat for a moment if it takes too much damage. However, actually damaging it requires you to expend very precious resources.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The Bunker is a considerable break from the conventions of the series, being a shorter, non-linear open-ended experience with randomized items and Immersive Sim gameplay elements and even giving the player a limited capability to defend themselves. In terms of plot, the main character is more of a bystander to the central events rather than having them revolve around him, and the backstory is entirely conveyed through notes rather than it ever playing a direct role in the gameplay.
• Menu Time Lockout: The game is paused while you are looking through your inventory, reading notes or interacting with the item box in your safe room. This lets you read and strategize in peace without having to worry about the Beast showing up or wasting precious generator fuel. The "Shell Shock" difficulty disables this.
• Metroidvania: The game counts as a horror-focused example, but is otherwise played straight. The bunker is a rather nonlinear map and often has multiple ways to accomplish objectives, as well as upgrades and map pieces hidden away in each zone. The two major items required to progress (the wrench and boltcutters) can even be obtained after exploring a large chunk of the map and mostly serve to open hidden areas and clear the way to the plunger. This even allows the player to get the shotgun extremely early into their playthrough if they book it to the Roman tunnels as soon as possible.
• Mood Dissonance: The game is set on a cloudy day in July, though you only get brief glimpses of it. Stare too long at the sunlit battlefield outside the pillbox and a German sniper will start taking potshots at you.
• Multiple Endings: Though it's really only a single ending with one change in detail. If Henri does not kill the Beast, the Beast will break out of the ruins alongside Henri and run off into No Man's Land. The sequence afterward plays out the same regardless.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In the journal entries you find across the bunker, you'll hear Henri's thoughts as he expresses great remorse and regret for the things he did in the past. Exactly what he's referring to beyond killing enemy soldiers and feeling guilt for doing so is unclear. If you read the note that is in Henri's locker, you learn that, during a game of chance to decide who would go on a certain patrol, Henri cheated to ensure he wouldn't go. The one who went in his place, Augustin, did not report back, and Henri snuck out to look for him, thus setting the events of the game in motion.
  • One of the officers feels immensely guilty for leaving his men to die in the bunker, so he tries to atone for it by broadcasting the code to unlock the bunker's arsenal so any surviving soldiers can collect the dynamite inside and hopefully blast their way out of the bunker.
• Mythology Gag: Once more, the player-character in the Amnesia games come across a prisoner in a confined cell whose death is all but certain in order to make progress towards completing objectives unless you put yourself at tremendous risk to drive the monster away.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Henri unintentionally created the Beast when he gave Lambert some water from his cantene. Said water, mind you, came from the spring in the recently excavated Roman tunnels, which contain the Harvester mutagen.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Falling into the abyss plays a scene where Henri lands in a pitch-black location and a familiar sounding roar is heard as Henri gets devoured by the source.
• One Last Smoke: The mortally wounded soldier you meet at the beginning of the game has a burning cigarette in his hand.
• Point of No Return:
  • Picking up the dynamite or the wirecutters will cause the Beast to burrow a hole inside your safe room. From this point on, nowhere in the bunker is completely safe and the urgency of obtaining the remaining key items to escape becomes much more significant.
  • Jumping in the hole created by dynamiting the bunker exit leads to the endgame, at which point there's no going back. Downplayed in that the final area is just the final confrontation with the Beast, which should last 5 minutes of gameplay at most.
• Psychological Horror: Despite the game offering defensive tools, the scarcity of resources makes the game continue the series' tradition of having players prefer to avoid direct contact with enemies.
• Resources Management Gameplay: In stark contrast to previous entries, The Bunker has a crafting system that allows you to make items using resources you've collected in your journey around the bunker, like using pieces of cloth to make bandages. You only have a limited number of inventory slots, however (you start off with six), and the only items that do not take up space are your bullets, which are exceedingly scarce in comparison to other resources you'll find across the bunker. To give you an idea how scarce, each box of ammunition you find only carries a single bullet. Even the bricks that you can use to smash down doors as an alternative to explosives are only good for two "breaks", cracking apart and becoming useless after that.
• Revisiting the Roots: While Rebirth was a big step up in scope for the series, with more characters, cutscenes, many different locations, etc, The Bunker goes the opposite direction, with a much smaller and more focused scope. While the presentation, polish, and mechanical complexity are definitely studio quality, the actual scope of the game is much closer to that of an indie horror title; there are no cutscenes outside the prologue, the entire game takes place in a single non-linear location, and the whole narrative is simplicity itself: you're trapped in a bunker with a monster, find the key items you need to open the exit and escape. As such the game is also shorter than previous titles, but theoretically with more replay value due to the randomized item placement and fully unscripted nature of the monster and the immersive emergent puzzles.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Besides the monster, the bunker is also occupied by groups of unusually large (about the size of a rabbit) and aggressive rats which will attack you if you get too close to them. You'll have to find creative ways of clearing them out in order to progress. Notes heavily imply that the rats are like this because they drank the water in the Roman tunnels, which is infected with Harvester mutagen.
• Run or Die: Downplayed. Unlike previous installments, Henri can defend himself using grenades or a gun. The problem is that ammo and more grenades are hard to come by, and have the possibility of alerting the monster, so it's up to the player to decide if it's worth fighting back or running and hiding.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The bunker's commanding officers abandoned their posts and their men the moment the Beast appeared and caved in the entrance to the bunker behind them to seal the Beast inside, trapping the soldiers they left behind with it. There's also an achievement for closing out the game right after seeing Boisrond get killed in the infirmary.
• Sequence Breaking: Nothing is forcing a player to search for the dog tags necessary to unlock the Arsenal and the storage lockers. While it would certainly take significant time, it is entirely possible to just brute-force every lock, including the lock on the progress-enabling wrench. Doing so completely eliminates the need to explore both Maintenance and the Soldier Quarters, which are incidentally the largest and most complicated areas to explore.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: There are at minimum one and potentially two shotguns hidden in the game, although you can only carry one of them. One is carried by the soldier in the Roman tunnels, and the other has a random chance of being in one of the lockers in Mission Storage. A shotgun blast can break open wooden doors, and a full blast will always drive the Beast off, but shotgun ammo is the rarest resource in the game, and it's unlikely you'll find more than 4 or 5 shells in a single game, 2 of which are only found in the final boss arena.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: After taking a near hit from an explosive shell in the prologue, Henri spends several days unconscious in the bunker's recovery ward, and thus misses out on the Beast emerging and slaughtering the rest of the bunker's inhabitants over the course of a few days. Fortunately for Henri, the recovery ward is in an out-of-the-way section of the bunker which the Beast never bothered to burrow to or search.
• Stalked by the Bell: As soon as you flip the switch on the generator, you are on the clock. The instant that the generator runs out of fuel, the lights go out, and the Beast is completely let loose, meaning that you now have to trek back to the safe room either in a tense cat-and-mouse game or make a mad dash to the safe room as the monster closes in on you.
• Stealth-Based Game: While means to defend oneself exist this time, ammo is so scarce that stealth still remains the best option to survive.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Unless you are playing on Easy difficulty, there is only a single lantern in the safe room at the center of the map. When entering the late-game Roman tunnels however, the game provides you with a second lantern at the tunnel entrance. Just in time for your encounter with the Ax-Crazy Beaufoy and his shotgun.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: Even when fully wound, your hand-cranked flashlight won't last more than 30 seconds before it needs to be cranked again, potentially attracting the Beast.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: Like previous Amnesia games, the game never leaves the protagonist's point of view. However, unlike previous games, there are also no cutscenes or story exposition moments outside of the prologue, with the entire game being gameplay and the story having to be pieced together from the various notes laying around.
• Underground Level: The Bunker's entire premise centers around exploring a large underground WWI bunker filled with monsters, all while uncovering its mysteries and looking for a way out.
• Unique Enemy:
  • In the Prologue, the player fights four German Riflemen, this is the only time German soldiers that Henri can shoot appear in-game.
  • In the Roman tunnels there's a very trigger-happy human soldier (Toussaint Beaufoy, as indicated in the note you find shortly before meeting him) armed with a shotgun who's been driven mad by the influence of the tunnels, likely due to dimensional bleed-over from Tihana's world. He's too far gone with insanity to be reasoned with, so you need to either fight or stealth around him. You need to explore this area to obtain both the detonator lever you need to escape the bunker and Lambert's dog tag that unlocks his locker which contains a journal revealing the origin of the monster.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Henri unknowingly set the events of the game in motion by reviving Lambert with water from the crater's spring. It turns out that the water was tainted with mutagen, which slowly transformed Lambert into what would become the Beast.
• Was Once a Man: Two journal entries reveal that the Beast is actually Lambert, who was mutated and slowly driven insane by crater's spring water that Henri gave him to drink.
• Weakened by the Light: The Beast dislikes light and will be much less active as long as the bunker lights are on, which requires the generator to be fueled and running. It will still be drawn to loud noises such as gunshots, explosions, excessive crashing around, etc. The rats likewise can be driven off with flares or an improvised torch.
• Wham Shot: On a meta level, seeing the eerie blue lights and levitating magnetic rocks first seen in Amnesia: Rebirth, which provides significant context about what's happening and the nature of the Beast provided you played that game. On a gameplay level, seeing a rat coming out of the safe room and subsequently seeing a new hole has been opened up within it, signifying that now nowhere is safe.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Notably encouraged by the inventory design. The one object you can have on you at all times is your pistol. It takes up no inventory slots, and if you manage to scrounge together a full clip, any extra ammo is kept to the side. This makes it very easy for you to use it as a default tool and encourages you to rely on it beyond anything else, even your flashlight. Many problems can be made easier by spending a bullet, such as unlocking padlocks or setting fire to objects, and combining the bullets you get with environmental interactables such as powder kegs can allow you to skip difficult sections. While the amount of bullets you get a playthrough is rather low (around 20 shots total), you still get enough ammo at a decent clip to use the pistol throughout the entire game.

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