Amnesia: The Bunker Review

ign.com:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent changed the face of horror games 13 years ago, and 2020's Amnesia: Rebirth seemed to bring the story seeds it planted to a bone-chilling and climactic final bloom. So Amnesia: The Bunker, a smaller and more self-contained chapter, has its work cut out for it in getting me excited about this frightening franchise again. And while a lot of the fundamentals of its stealth and exploration have stayed the same as they were when I woke up as Daniel more than a decade ago, this gloomy, open-ended cat-and-mouse thriller proves you can teach an old hellbeast some new tricks.

Set in a dim, doomed World War I bunker in 1916, we take on the role of a French soldier who is wounded in battle, and wakes to find the exits destroyed and nearly all of his comrades-in-arms slaughtered by something lurking in the dark. The first and biggest shake-up to the usual Amnesia routine is that the entire bunker, which feels bigger than it looks on paper, is available to explore from fairly early on. Similar to Metroid or Resident Evil, you'll have to track down a small arsenal of tools to access certain areas and progress the story, but you're given very little direction in terms of where to go next. This helps to build tension, because every expedition out of the lamp-lit central safe room is a drain on your very limited resources, and probably your resolve, too.

Whereas most enemies in other Amnesia games are scripted to patrol a specific area in a specific way, The Bunker takes a refreshing page out of Alien: Isolation’s book and features a single, ever-present threat called the Stalker that lives behind the walls and above the ceiling of your concrete prison. It's attracted to noise, which can be anything from running,