So many games get the "horror" label, but I'm not often that scared by them. Take this year's Alan Wake 2, for example. It's a great thriller with some genuinely spooky moments, but otherwise the biggest frights were FMV jump scares that felt like those old troll YouTube videos where an exorcist face would pop outta nowhere. Cynthia Weaver, you are on notice: if you pull that on me one more time I will point a flare gun at you and pull the trigger.
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2023, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
All of which is to say that Amnesia: The Bunker genuinely scared the crap out of me from start to finish. Its constant, crushing atmosphere and surprising monster AI practically had me too spooked to keep playing, but I'm so glad I did.
It's an intimate game, even more so than its clear inspiration, Alien: Isolation. But there are no weird androids to detract from your high-stakes dance with one central antagonist: a malformed beast (Frictional calls it the Stalker) crawling in the walls of this horrible place. There is one notable (and very cool) instance where you square off with a stinky man in a hole instead, but it's kind of a fun side story and doesn't take away from the game's core loop.
The Stalker will be actively patrolling the bunker in the background of your exploration. It uses a system of tunnels to move faster than you can, and the only visual evidence of this little underground highway we're privy to are the ominous, man-sized mouse holes in the walls.
My understanding is that it never fully despawns—it's always searching, homing in on you, with its arrival in your immediate vicinity heralded by scratching and groaning in the walls.
Outside the Thief series, The Bunker has some of the best tying of gameplay to audio I've ever seen, with the Stalker clearly telegraphing its alert level with no UI element required. The shells and gunfire outside the bunker kept me constantly on edge, complicating that early warning system, while the ruckus I made while exploring could gradually (or abruptly) catch the Stalker's attention.
All the open-ended slapstick joy of Deus Ex or Dishonored is here if you're willing to look for it.
Adding to all this stress is the generator, which Leon Hurley at GamesRadar aptly called "the real terror" of The Bunker. Keeping the thing fueled keeps the lights on, lowering the risk of Stalker encounters and saving you from the advanced darkness of this miserable pit.
The Itchy and Scratchy Show
I barely even scratched the immersive sim problem-solving techniques buried in this game. Your World War 1 crappy revolver is the marquee anti-Stalker tool in your repertoire, but if you can keep your wits about you enough to be creative, there's so much more you can do to clown on this creepy guy.
Once you've found a gas mask, gas grenades become a handy escape tool: run into the cloud, and the Stalker can't follow. You can block its tunnels with crates to slow it down, lure the Stalker into traps left by your dead comrades, craft your own traps with generously placed videogame explosive barrels, the list goes on. Once you get past the absolutely oppressive atmosphere (which I still haven't done), you can turn The Bunker into a videogame adaptation of Tom and Jerry.
I don't know if I'll ever achieve that level of immsim mastery with The Bunker, but I love that it's there. All the open-ended slapstick joy of Deus Ex or Dishonored is here if you're willing to look for it. This achievement also has me excited for what comes next from Frictional Games.
The Bunker has a great, classic horror yarn at its heart, but I found myself missing the really out-there, philosophical stuff you can find in Frictional's previous work like Penumbra or Soma. If the developer keeps pushing in this player freedom direction with its future games while returning to that sense of mind-expanding cosmic dread I crave, we could have some new horror classics on the horizon. Maybe that's the best thing about The Bunker: It's already a superb pants-shitter, while it also opens the door to even more horrific things in the future
