Episode 179 - A Rusty Crux - Amnesia: The Bunker

I’m on the podcast tonight? C’est la vie. Welcome back to the podcast! We’re finally finishing our Halloween games this week with Amnesia: The Bunker. This is the fourth game in the Amnesia series and introduce some light combat elements as well as reframes the series’ physics system to create an immersive sim type experience with several options to overcome obstacles. And of course, it’s still an Amnesia game, so you’ll be evading an ever present monster who wants to maul you. Set in World War I, the game makes good use of its setting with the intermittent sounds of combat keeping you on your toes and the crank flashlight and crude tools playing with the game’s sound mechanics to ensure you never feel fully safe. The game also has a weird relationship with its own mechanics sometimes. With a single save room and the high lethality of the monster, you’ll find yourself back in administration from time to time with more resources than you died with and new information of where and where not to go. This can sometimes encourage dying to reset and save precious generator fuel and to reroute, giving the game a bit of a fragmented feeling. However, if you don’t mind these things or just do a good job of surviving, it has enough interesting things to be worth giving a go. We’re going to be talking about the relative difficulty (and difficulty settings), how the options you have vary and where we think it could have been a bit more varied, and we connect the game to the first game in only ways that are wrong. Thank you for joining us again this week! I realize this has been a long October, but we did want to get through the games we set aside for the spooky time of year. And we ended strong as far as the actual fear went. Would have been nice to actually have landed on Halloween, but here we are. Did you struggle with this game at all? Did you find a use for the flare? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re finishing yet another theme by playing Loretta, a final game named after a woman that begins with the letter L, so we hope you’ll join us then!