NOCLIP Pocket E82 - Diarrhea Wednesday - The Bunker

One whiff of this and you’ll have your throat slit over the last
tin of podcasts. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going
to be talking about The Bunker, an FMV adventure game with a
surprising level of production value. We chose to cover this game
partly because we had played it before, and there are several other
things coming up that are going to take up a lot of our time, and
also partly just to expose ourselves as people who keep really
hoping for an FMV game to really knock our socks off. This didn’t
manage that, but it still has some interesting qualities. Being a
more modern game, The Bunker lacks the B-movie cheesiness that is
honestly the selling point for a lot of older FMV titles these
days, but having a focus on more of the filmic quality is a
direction you rarely see these types of games go. Using actors with
experience and some truly outstanding set design goes a long way to
make the game feel more like a movie. More like a movie, in fact,
that it does a game. The Bunker’s level of interaction is low.
Barring one or maybe two instances, your choices have no impact on
the plot unfolding, and most of the things that require player
input could have easily been accomplished without it, making the
interactivity feel like a token inclusion. While it doesn’t strike
the perfect balance, or much of a balance at all, there is
something that still feels pretty novel about it, and the story it
tells is at worst competently executed and pretty interesting.
We’re going to talk about how much interaction the game has and
what impact it really makes, the environments in the game and how
much they sell the premise, and we talk about the things that
really don’t need to follow a schedule. Thank you for joining us
again this week! This was a short episode on a pretty short game
because we are gearing up for some bigger things in the future and
we wanted to maintain living while still being able to get them out
in time. Still, this is at least kind of a strange one to look at
right? FMV is a dying, some would say dead, subgenre and to see the
amount of care put into making this feel like a modern piece of
media gives me at least some respect for it. Have you played any
FMV games in recent times? How do you think the genre holds up, and
is there a way of making an interactive film like this more
satisfying to play? Let us know over in the Discord or in the
comments section! Next time, unless we find the inspiration to do
some kind of filler between this and Zelda, we’re going to be
talking about the Resident Evil 4 remake, so we hope you’ll join us
then.