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!