Numerous conflict video games have tried to seize the essence of army battle on an enormous scale. Whether or not it’s from the cold perspective of a tactical commander overseeing the battlefield, or as a heartfelt tableau of valiant hearts misplaced within the trenches, videogames have grappled with the burden of its enormity throughout all genres. It’s notable that horror video games set through the Nice Struggle are few and much between, drowned out by first-person shooters that have you ever charging alongside hedgerows brandishing a bolt-action rifle flush with ammo. Amnesia The Bunker bucks that development, eschewing the grandiose to seize the sensory and emotional expertise of the horror of trench warfare, echoing the outstanding WWI poets that got here earlier than it.
To actually do Amnesia The Bunker’s poetic horror justice, we have to delve into its varied twists, in addition to its ending – evidently, there are spoilers beneath.
The Bunker opens with protagonist Henri Clement vaulting right into a trench to flee a hail of enemy fireplace. Thus begins the sport’s tutorial: scavenging for bullets for a spare standard-issue six-chambered revolver, ducking behind cowl to keep away from the sightlines of the German forces, and nearly succumbing to a shock fuel assault. This frantic introduction delivers a distinct sense of place – the immediacy of the calamitous Nice Struggle unfolding round you – then abruptly traps you within the eponymous bunker.
That is the purpose at which long-time followers of the collection may count on The Bunker to go away the conflict behind. Whether or not it’s the lavishly furnished rooms of Brennenburg Fort or the sun-bleached panorama of the Algerian desert, earlier places within the Amnesia collection are imbued with a transitory, dreamlike state. As in a conventional Lovecraftian story, their outlined sense of place steadily falls away because the cthonic forces that drive every narrative take maintain. Whereas this supernatural displacement is extremely unnerving, it additionally comes with the overarching sense that earlier occasions within the collection may happen in any fortress, any desert, and nonetheless maintain muster. The occasions of Amnesia The Bunker, nonetheless, couldn’t happen anyplace else.
The bunker has no finish to the parallels of the trenches that lie past its partitions. Its corridors are oppressively slim and usually current certainly one of two instructions: ahead or again. Detritus, together with sandbags, disused ammunition containers, and lifeless our bodies, litter its many rooms, and countless strings {of electrical} wire present scant energy to doorways and lights. As I descend deeper into the bunker’s bowels, I encounter tripwires and snares that set off grenades and fuel, trench traps that had been a standard prevalence in direction of the tip of WWI. Within the split-second second between setting off a fuel grenade and pulling up the stock to equip a fuel masks. I can’t assist however be reminded of the ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ as described by Wilfred Owen in Dulce et Decorum Est. This newest iteration of Amnesia even swaps its iconic, timeless lantern for a traditionally correct, mechanically powered dynamo flashlight, and simply the sound of its whirring pull twine is sufficient to attract the eye of the Stalker.
Naturally, Amnesia The Bunker is designed to place you in conditions the place you’re pressured to attract the Stalker’s ire. This supernatural predator assumes a humanoid form twisted into bestial type. It’s additionally completely inescapable, using trench techniques to tunnel from space to space – together with the bunker’s solely protected room, a lot to my horror. Shut encounters usually encompass a flurry of exercise (an explosion, a gunshot, a brick thrown at a door to achieve entry) after which a tense few moments because the Stalker descends and all you are able to do is hunker down and look ahead to it to move, or try a suicide run. As a strolling metaphor for the ‘war to end all wars’, it’s definitely efficient.
The quiet revelation that the Stalker is Augustin Lambert, Clement’s wide-eyed brother-in-arms, is consigned to misplaced notes and implication. His metamorphosis echoes Owen’s personal vocalization of the grotesque results of the indoctrination of conflict upon younger males in Arms and the Boy, with the suggestion of claws, talons, and antlers, and the ‘cartridges of fine zinc teeth / Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death’. This juxtaposition between the war-touched soldier and the harmless little one extends to the one clue that serves as affirmation: a toy rabbit, bought by Lambert as a present for his son. After I throw the toy in a last-ditch try to flee sure demise, the Stalker ceases its rampaging to cradle it with care. Lambert retains a glimmer of humanity however is irrevocably modified, simply as all troopers of conflict.
Furthermore, Lambert’s horrific transformation into the Stalker is in itself a nod to the troopers who had been pressured to gather water from the underside of shell holes, heedless of no matter illnesses it would include within the face of persistent dehydration. The water itself is run by Henri from his waterskin, which Lambert drinks gratefully – this easy act of human compassion is deadly on the frontline, and echoes Siegfried Sassoon’s The Loss of life Mattress: ‘Someone was holding water to his mouth / He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped / Through crimson gloom to darkness’.
Whereas the Stalker is undoubtedly the best risk which you can encounter down in the dead of night, it’s additionally not alone. Henri is commonly beset by swarms of monumental rats that feast on corpses and discarded rations, usually blocking the trail to an goal. These vermin are an apparent counterpart to the notorious trench rats that proliferated in each dimension and quantity throughout WWI, and shortly grew to become an inescapable torment to the troopers that had been pressured to co-exist with them.
Within the bunker, rats assault in giant numbers when threatened, and doggedly observe the blood trails Henri leaves when injured. I’m repeatedly confronted with the plain dilemma of methods to dispatch them; I’d decide to make use of my pistol, grenades, or a lit torch to both kill or dissuade them – however provides are scarce, and for as many rats as I can kill, extra will finally take their place. Regardless of my frustration, I can’t assist however really feel a sure affinity with them as I slink from room to room within the bunker, opportunistic and determined to outlive. ‘Not worse than ours the lives rats lead,’ Owen says in A Terre, and as I descend upon one other corpse to seek for but one other code scrawled on the again of a canine tag, I can’t assist however agree.
Whereas there are not any scripted sequences, it’s telling that the closest The Bunker ever involves a jumpscare doesn’t really contain the Stalker in any respect. Shell bombardments happen at random and rock the bunker to its very foundations, and their muffled ‘boom’ far surpasses the binaural scrabbling of the Stalker on the prowl. The Bunker’s soundscape is a continuing callback to what lies past the confines of the bunker, however even this pales compared to my ascent into the bunker’s pillbox.
As I climb the ladder, I look as much as see a shaft of golden mild beaming down from a crack within the pillbox roof. Maybe naively, I start to think about that this may represent a method out; in any case, The Bunker flirts with immersive sim design, a style outlined by risk. As soon as inside, I’m met with a view that spans throughout all of no man’s land, a pastoral idyll of the French countryside. I’m struck by the resemblance to Constable’s landscapes, wreathed in smoke – till the bullets ricocheting off the pillbox break the spell, and I’m catapulted into Owen’s nightmarish astral projection in The Present, proper all the way down to the ‘horror of harsh wire’ that winds its method throughout the pillbox window. The conflict is likely to be rampaging by means of the bunker, but it surely lies past it as effectively, spanning a rustic – a world.
The Bunker’s grim, poetic horror culminates in its ultimate moments. Henri stumbles out of the tunnels and into the sunshine of no man’s land and slips right into a shell crater awash with the decaying and dismembered corpses of his fellow troopers. As he examines their stays, it turns into manifestly obvious that there’s nothing materially completely different about these our bodies and people inside the bunker. The deadly wounds inflicted by the Stalker are a precise mirror to the fallen troopers in no man’s land – their torn uniform, lacking limbs, and disfigured faces are wholly analogous to 1 one other.
In his flight from the bunker and the Stalker inside, Henri has been pushed ‘over the top’. There may be nowhere to show, nowhere to run. As German troopers shut in on his place, the Nice Struggle stalks together with them, and the exhausting minimize to black spells the finality, the futility of his wrestle to flee. Henri turns into Lambert’s stuffed rabbit, ‘lying in that crater, rain and weather matting its fur, unloved, forgotten, totally alone, lost forever’. In an echo of Owen, Henri’s finish is much from candy – and but, within the context of the poets that sought to seize the worry, horror, and futility of WWI, it’s solely becoming.
