5 Reasons Amnesia: The Bunker is the Best Amnesia Yet

The Amnesia series has been a mainstay in horror since the release of The Dark Descent back in 2010. Immediately, Amnesia set itself up as a series that was more than just a jumpscare-fest (though it has plenty of those as well). It was tense, atmospheric, and — above all — narratively driven. While running and hiding from Amensia has always been exceptional fun, what truly separates Amnesia from most other horror games and series is its steadfast commitment to sharp writing, complex themes, and narrative twists

Frictional Games’ Amnesia series has been a mainstay in horror since the release of The Dark Descent back in 2010. Immediately, Amnesia set itself up as a series that was more than just a jumpscare-fest (though it has plenty of those as well). It was tense, atmospheric, and — above all — narratively driven. While running and hiding from various monsters has always been exceptionally frightening, what truly separates Amnesia from most other horror games and series is its steadfast commitment to sharp writing, complex themes, and narrative twists. Add in some physics puzzles and the titular amnesiac main character, and you’ve got yourself a solid horror package.

This has been true for each game, from The Dark Descent up to Rebirth, including the Red-Barrels-developed A Machine for Pigs. And now, Amnesia: The Bunker is no different. It still has the narrative heights and the bone-curdling scares of its predecessors, but it has improved on the formula to create a truly engaging leap forward for the franchise. This is Amnesia at its peak and might be the first game in the franchise to eclipse the original. In this article, we are going to look at 5 ways in which Amnesia: The Bunker is the best game in the series.

1. A Different Setting for a Different World War

The most immediately striking thing about The Bunker is its setting: a French bunker in World War I. And, before anything else, this demonstrates an immediate improvement that The Bunker makes. While each game in the series has had a deliciously atmospheric location, from the decaying Prussian castle in Dark Descent to the ruin-strewn desert of Rebirth, those are undeniably generic and static locations. They are places not impacted by their era and would fit in if any of the games were set a hundred years apart from their actual dates.

But a bunker? A bunker is a representation of its time. It is a temporary installation, haphazardly cobbled together out of the necessity of war. It is inherently precarious and unstable, like the situation around it. It, in short, encapsulates the chaos that enables the horror much more than previous games. Rather than just being a relevant atmospheric pastiche, the setting in The Bunker is an additional source of the game’s horror. Not only that, but it also helps demonstrate one of the game’s main themes. But we will come back to that later down the list…

2. Higher Octane Horror

Amnesia has always been scary, but it hasn’t always been consistent. For every water-monster in The Dark Descent, you have segments in each game where the main monster is simply shambling goofily at you down a hallway. You can see it coming, and – after a while – you stop being scared of the monster because you learn how it works. Oh, it is near you? Hiding under a bed makes you basically immune. Chased? Well, you are faster, so just dive into a room and find a closet. The best moments to replay in the older games are the moments when you are forced to make a loud noise or complete a puzzle while being stalked by the monsters because it forces you to break that safety loop.

The Bunker is all those moments. Not only is the monster here much smarter and more devious than before, able to traverse through tunnels and appear in the worst possible places, but it is also deployed more effectively. You are forced to make noise constantly, and the puzzles you have to solve are almost unanimously surrounded by holes the beast may arrive from. What’s more, the monster is patient; once you’ve made a noise, that hole near you may be a death sentence for the entire time you are in the area. It makes every sally out of the Administration room (or even within it, if you’ve forgotten to lock the doors) freshly terrifying, in a way that is more tense more often than any of the other games in the series.

3. Thematic Liftoff

Coming off of Soma, the most obviously thematic and philosophical game in Frictional Games’ catalog, one might expect Amnesia: The Bunker to be similarly heady. Especially since the themes in Amnesia have always been core to the experience, many were expecting the bunker to be filled with deep explorations on war, perhaps up to and including “thought experiment” moments like in Soma. It would seem that that was the direction Frictional was going: toward slower horror burns whose themes are densely layered and complicated, with ambiguity.

Thank goodness it didn’t turn out like that. The themes in The Bunker are anything but slow and philosophical, anything but dragging. And yet, they are some of the clearest and most original themes in the series. Because they combine with the story and gameplay in ways that they haven’t since all the way back in A Machine for Pigs, and even then The Bunker does it better. There is no internal narration telling you what the themes are: instead, you witness them. The setting itself, for example, is thematic: showing that the war is just as sick and deadly behind the lines as in No Man’s Land (and often overlooked fact). This game is no less steeped in poignant messages and grant ideas, but it combines those right into what makes the game best, improving both parts as a result.

4. Problem-Solving, not Puzzle-Chasing

We’ve all seen it: the physics puzzle where you need to crank a level to raise a board to climb a scaffold to reach an item to combine into a potion to use to get past the thing blocking the next level. God forbid any objects or locations within a frightening building be placed or laid out in any logical way, after all. And Amnesia, for all its strengths, is a serious victim of this epidemic: the epidemic of puzzles that feel inorganic and unconsidered in the world, that sees elements of the puzzles placed haphazardly to improve gameplay so that it becomes unbelievable.

Once again, The Bunker leaps over this pitfall. Unlike all the previous games in the series, The Bunker doesn’t have gamey puzzles: it has realistic obstacles. In the game, a locked door has a key stored in a logical location, for instance. One you can usually intuit with logic even without using the more obvious clues (or without just checking every nook and cranny). And all the roadblocks are like this: they are realistic obstacles created by believable circumstances, the solutions to which (and many have multiple solutions) are just as logical. 

My favorite puzzle solution is “break it with a grenade,” by the way.

5. Not Lost in the Lore

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is about a man slowly coming to terms with the horror of his past as he slowly realizes the torment and evil he created in his life. It is also about a weird extradimensional alien dude who needs to use material vampirically siphoned from tortured criminals in order to open a portal and return to the dimension he was banished from.

Amnesia is filled to the brim with bizarre arcane lore about portals and aliens, amount celestial empresses, and stolen colonial artifacts with strange magical powers. And it always drags down the game’s horror, even when it is used to make a thematic point (and it is always related to colonialism, which Amnesia has never been tactful about but, until now, seemed utterly committed to exploring).

Finally, The Bunker breaks from that. While there are Roman ruins within the game which harken to the same ideas, The Bunker sees those things as distant backstories and set-ups. A flavoring on top of the visceral, much more grounded dangers that make it possible to take The Bunker much more seriously as a horror story. There is no extradimensional entity trying to reach out to colonize our world, nor a strange concoction created from torturing people that represents a resource those extradimensional beings are after. Instead, there is a monster in the bunker, with only hints about the nature and origins of the things that caused it. 

Sometimes, less is more. This is one of those times.

All this taken into account, it is clear to see why, after 13 years, Amnesia: The Bunker is the culmination of everything that the Amnesia series should be. Its themes and narratives are stronger. It’s gameplay and horror is better. And it has dropped a lot of the strange jank and weight that held previous titles back. Where will Amnesia go from here? I’ve got no idea. But if the team at Frictional Games follows in the footsteps of The Bunker, it is going to be great. Stay scary and stay smart, Amnesia.