Amnesia: The Bunker

Amnesia: Rebirth wasn't all that well received, as I recall. I had hoped otherwise after SOMA: it's possible that its brilliant writing was largely thanks to Mikael Hedberg who left Frictional Games after the fact. Epic gave away Rebirth at some point and it's still making its way up on my backlog. Frictional's next game, Amnesia: The Bunker appeared on Game Pass soon after its release -- better-received than Rebirth. I had thought to skip past the backlog to play Rebirth first but because the two games are not connected, I decided otherwise.

We have Alien: Isolation at home

Amnesia: The Bunker takes place in the First World War. You play as a French soldier Henri Clément who gets trapped in a bunker. To escape, Henri needs to find explosives and a detonator to blow up the bunker's collapsed entrance. The problem is there being some thing in the bunker with him.

There are too many similarities to plausibly deny The Bunker having been heavily inspired by Alien: Isolation. The tools, the whole horror survival gameplay down to a clunky revolver, even the unkillable monster, are so alike with Isolation's feature set. There are differences, though. For instance, where the alien doesn't mind going wherever, the beast is averse to bright lights. (I also doubt it has quite as advanced behavior model.)

The Bunker being a survival horror game, light is of course a limited resource. The game gives you a safe/save room from which you sort of embark on expeditions to different wings of the bunker. (Depending on difficulty settings, the safe room might not be completely safe.) The safe room has a generator which powers the bunker's lights. To keep it running, you need fuel, which the generator eats up quickly.

Lights going out means the beast is free to roam about, which makes things challenging. You're not exactly safe while lights are on either, though. Loud noises -- like using a grenade to get through a door -- will summon the monster despite lighting. You have a shitty dynamo flashlight but charging it makes so much noise that I felt that using it was a trap most of the time.

The Bunker randomizes items and such, including passcodes. I think the game should do code rolls when you find a code, instead of doing them all at the start. With how it is, you can do a resources wasting rush to find a code, then reload a save back to the safe room to visit a locker room next to it to use the code even though Henri has not technically found the code yet. Or the game could allow you to not use number locks until you've actually found the code in question -- that's how Alien: Isolation works.

Of course, it's up to you how you want to play but in my opinion the game being centered around the safe/save room hurts the experience. It's too easy to abuse the system. Trips to the unknown don't feel dangerous because nothing is that far away. You don't lose much time by reloading and doing everything again -- which will be quicker, better optimized because you then know what to do and where to go.

It did take a bit for me to realize that, however, so there was at least a stress element for a couple of hours or so. But scary The Bunker was only up to the first non-scripted appearance of the beast. I was unimpressed by its sound design. By comparison, the alien is so much scarier; the beast's audio design is of a generic video game monster. Ambient audio design I did find authentic and immersive, though.