YMMV / Amnesia: The Bunker

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The final confrontation with the Beast is rather easy, especially if you come armed with the shotgun. All you need to do is lure it over a wooden bridge, stun it, and then break the bridge with a grenade or shotgun blast. The encounter can be over in seconds, and the monster can even be stunned by throwing it the rabbit toy. However, in most cases (possibly added by a patch) the Beast will leap to safety if you try to shotgun the bridge it's standing on, even if it's stunned by a gunshot or firebomb. Instead you need to destroy or block off enough bridges to force it to jump towards you across a gap, at which point you can shotgun it into the pit when it grabs your ledge; this whole process at least feels like a legitimate final fight. You can still distract it with the rabbit then destroy the bridge for an easy win, though this does require you to find and keep the rabbit.
  • What would ordinarily be an incredibly tense encounter with an Ax-Crazy, shotgun-wielding maniac in the hallucinogenic Roman tunnels can be made very brief when you remember that Beaufoy is still just an ordinary human. If you have two rounds in your revolver you can simply shoot him twice and kill him before he has a chance to react. This is made especially easy on repeat playthroughs, since Beaufoy always starts in the exact same spot and leaves himself open by shooting a rat. This has been somewhat mitigated with the Halloween Update, which made it so that Beaufoy is more attentive and has a random starting position on repeated playthroughs.
• Breather Level: While by no means being free and clear of danger, getting through the Arsenal and reaching the explosives at the end is a far less complicated affair than getting to the Arsenal. Other than a handful of traps that can be disarmed with the boltcutters, the layout is simply an expansive maze. With sufficient fuel in the generator to keep the lights on and enough care to not cause enough noise to draw out the Beast, you can safely make your way in and out with little difficulty.
• Evil Is Cool: The Beast is one of, if not the most terrifying monster to come out of the Amnesia series. In the same vein as a certain alien, the Beast can appear anywhere at any time, is unkillable despite you finally having weapons to defend yourself with and its tragic origins also make the conflict with it a very personal affair.
• Funny Moments: The Bunker is a relentlessly bleak and terrifying experience, but there is something a little humorous about finding a couple of rats eating a roll of cheese in the pantry instead of the usual dead carcass. Even with their mutated bodies and vicious disposition, some old preferences don't die out.
• Game-Breaker: Once you have access to the caged area in the wine cellar, with its huge store of empty bottles and have cleared a safe path to the giant fuel tank in Maintenance, which lets you fill those bottles with fuel, you will be able to create a nearly unlimited supply of fuel bottles to keep the generator running. However, since you are likely to access these resources close to the end of the game and can even miss them entirely, the impact on the overall experience is minimal.
  • The developers themselves also became aware of this and added a custom difficulty option that locks the door to the fuel tank in Maintenance with a code lock like the one for the Arsenal, forcing you to find the appropriate dog tag code to access it. This option is active by default for the new Shell Shock difficulty.
• Goddamned Bats: More like Goddamned Rats. Those pesky, mutated little rodents are swarming everywhere and feast on the flesh of your deceased fellow soldiers, usually in the middle of hallways that you need to get by to progress and sitting on potentially valuable dog tags. While they aren't much of a threat on their own, they are essentially tiny alarm sirens for the Beast, hissing loudly when you get close. They can also still get you to bleed if you try to sprint past them, which can attract other rats to follow your blood trail and constantly expose your location. All methods of getting rid of them are pretty loud to boot and they will keep coming back unless you manage to burn the body they were eating.
• Narm: Soldat Boisrond's final moments would have been pretty scary, if only that he didn't constantly swear during it all. It makes you wonder if he was the potty-mouth of his garrison at some point in his life...
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Beast's origin. He's Augustine Lambert, Henri's best friend and comrade in arms who saved his life twice at the start of the game. Henri used an old sleight of hand trick in a game of chance to cheat Lambert into taking a routine patrol, a small bit of payback for all the pranks Lambert pulled on him during their time together. When Lambert didn't return, Henri was consumed with guilt and snuck out at night to go looking for him, finding him in the hole at the start of the game. Wanting to provide his friend with some comfort, Henri gave him some of the nearby water, not knowing it was infected with Harvester mutagen. The water healed Lambert's wounds, allowing him to carry Henri back to the bunker after they were spotted by a German patrol, but then started to turn him into a bloodthirsty monstrosity over the next few days. By the time Henri awakens, nothing is left of the noble man Lambert once was, no longer recognizing even his old friend as anything but prey.
  • The stuffed rabbit toy. A gift that Augustine bought for his son back home, but lost when he fell down the pit at the start of the game. You can find the rabbit alongside his dog tag by crawling through a hole next to the detonator handle in the Roman tunnels. Throwing the rabbit at the Beast will cause it to stop and pick it up, cradle it for a moment and then run away to put it in its shrine in the bunker chapel. This short moment shows that there is still a small shred of humanity left in him even after his monstrous transformation. It becomes doubly sad if you use it to distract and kill him during the final battle, using the last piece of his humanity to put him out of his misery.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Efficiency Expert" requires you to beat the game without using the item box or even dropping a single item. Given that you have an extremely limited inventory (starting with only six slots), you need to be very deliberate with which items you pick up, since you can't get rid of anything unless you use it. Keep in mind that all of the tools necessary for progression also require a slot each.
  • "Got It In One" requires you to beat the game without using a Save Point. You get exactly two auto-saves, one at the very start and one at the very end of the game, making this essentially a No-Death Run until you're almost done. Given that the Beast kills you in a single hit when it's out in the open (as well as any grenade traps you trigger), keeping a low profile is more important than ever.
  • The most difficult one by far is "Toot Sweet", requiring you to "complete the game faster than all developers at Frictional". What this means is that you have to beat the game in under 40 minutes. In a stealth-based Survival Horror game with a monster that is attracted by noise and kills you in one hit. With randomly placed items that you need to get from A to B. Good luck.
  • The Halloween Update brought a new achievement called "In Recovery". All you need to do is beat the game on the newly introduced "Shell Shock" difficulty. The foreboding name is fitting, as this difficulty not only makes the Beast more aggressive and resources scarcer, but it also makes some significant changes to the game that radically alter how you have to approach it. Think you can peek out, get some supplies and then run back to save? Too bad, saving now costs a full fuel canister. The sturdy metal doors keeping the Beast out of your safe room? Replaced with fragile wood. The generator light that keeps the Beast's aggression low and gives you some comforting visibility? You now need to find fuses before it can even reach all but one sub-area. Your trusty gun for self-defense and puzzle-solving? Placed into a locker, out of reach until you find the fitting dog tag. Oh, some of said lockers are also hidden throughout the bunker now. Have fun.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • For fans of the older Penumbra games, The Bunker can be considered Frictional going back and attempting to improve on the ideas of Overture, as even Black Plague ditched alot of the concepts of Overture instead of improving on them, such as combat and more limited use items like explosives, and takes them to a new improved level as opposed to how previous Amnesia games stripped them away even further.
  • After the Contested Sequels that were Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and (to a lesser extent) Amnesia: Rebirth for their lacking gameplay mechanics and neglect of their horror elements in favor of telling grand narratives, The Bunker by contrast puts its comparatively simple story into the background. It instead concentrates on creating the most complex and involved gameplay mechanics in the series and pushing the horror of being trapped with a monster in a claustrophobic environment to its limits.