Amnesia is a series of games from Frictional Games that has brought the survival-horror genre to new heights. The studio has just announced a new game in the series, Amnesia: The Bunker.
Amnesia Series
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the first game in the series, and it came out in 2010. Taking inspiration from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it created an ominous and foreboding world filled with various types of monsters and ghosts that are set on cutting your life short. The gameplay loop was fairly straightforward, forcing you to hide and cower from enemies while solving puzzles and collecting items along the way. This game is, to this day, one of the most iconic iterations of the “powerless” survival horror.
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Amnesia: Rebirth mostly tread in the footsteps of their forebear, offering a new story with the same goal of a grueling and terrifying fight for survival. The same type of “powerless” gameplay was present, forcing you to scurry away from enemies while trying to solve puzzles.
Amnesia: The Bunker will change things up
Like its predecessors, The Bunker will be set in the past, with the entire series slowly crawling toward contemporary times. You will be put into the shoes of a French soldier during the First World War. This soldier finds himself trapped inside a bunker while fully aware that “something” is hunting for him. Fighting for your survival will be the primary goal of the game.
Past games in the series offered a very linear experience. The main gist was always in the vein of “you are trapped somewhere; find your way out”. You always had the freedom to approach certain puzzles in any order you wanted, as well as take whichever routes when avoiding and hiding from enemies. The Bunker will attempt to change things for the first time by giving you more freedom when handling puzzles and obstacles. The developers have bragged that it will have very few scripted events.
The developers are confident in their capacity to offer an engaging story, even though the core gameplay has been mostly linear in the past. This is why they are trying to switch things up with The Bunker. They’ve talked extensively about the sandbox-style design that The Bunker will have. It will allow players to engage with the game’s systems in a more varied way, giving more control when choosing your path moving forward or when engaging with puzzles. For the first time in the series’ history, they will also give the player a gun, allowing him to fight certain enemies directly. This does not mean that when faced with certain powerful enemies, your only option won’t be to run and hide.
While they have a pretty hard road ahead of them, the developers are confident in their capacity to offer an immersive and unscripted world where every action you take will directly affect your chances of success. Amnesia: The Bunker will be launched sometime in 2023 on PC, Xbox, and Playstation consoles.
