Amnesia: The Bunker is Frictional Game’s latest offering in the renowned horror series. Their previous game, Amnesia Rebirth was a solid if not safe iteration of their familiar formula of exploration and cat-and-mouse survival horror. With the Bunker, it feels like Frictional is aiming to expand the depth of gameplay while also doubling down on what makes their series so iconic.

The setup for Amnesia: The Bunker is beautifully simple. You play as Henri, a soldier in the French army during a bloody trench skirmish in the midst of World War I. The game begins with you knifing through a blown-out battlefield, dodging mortar and rifle fire in a desperate bid to survive. You’re ultimately wounded, and awake in an abandoned bunker. As a callsign of it’s namesake, Henri is tasked with navigating a dark environment, searching for answers and a way to escape.

It’s classic and right on brand as far as plot and tone go for the Amnesia series. But what sets Amnesia: The Bunker apart is its fleshed-out gameplay mechanics.

Henri is a soldier, and as such comes equipped with a little more resourcefulness and survivability when compared to previous protagonists in the series. He’s trained in the use of firearms and first-aid and can combine loose materials found scattered around the bunker to craft items like Molotov cocktails or torches. This immediately sets Amnesia: The Bunker apart and establishes a decided evolution of the series.

The Amnesia series has always been praised for its oppressive atmosphere and relentless dread, amplified by how defenseless you felt as the player. Here, with an expanded toolset to aid in your journey, Amnesia: The Bunker adds a key ingredient that’s always been missing in the Series.

Decision making.

You have options now. Survival Horror is at its best when you’re faced with tough choices. Under the constant threat of death via unfathomable horror, you must manage your inventory and health, juggling key items and precious fuel for the bunker’s lighting system.  Do I press forward with only one inventory slot left? Or backtrack to the safe room and offload? Do I carry these extra resources in case of an emergency? Or do I commit them to taking up space in the storage chest?

This is the central loop of Amnesia: The Bunker.  You make brief outings from the safe room, gathering up scant supplies and dodging the ever-present beast that’s lurking nearby. It channels the horror classics we all know so well. It’s minimalist and unencumbered. It does not strive to reinvent the wheel but pays homage to the Greats. And It succeeds! It comes complete with a safe room and light, tentative music that plays as you mull over your threadbare resources.

When you gather up the courage to leave, you pick a route on the map, and try your best to commit it to memory as it’s the only one you get and it can’t leave the safe room with you. It creates these terrifying dynamic moments as you find your intended path cut off, or that room you expected to explore locked. Or even worse, you hear some bestial gurgle echoing out from the hallway you hoped to explore. Now, another decision. Do I re-route? Hopefully, you don’t get lost and can continue your way back. Or do you risk death and press forward? Or do you head straight back to the safe room to regroup and replan?

It all comes back to decisions. Amnesia: The Bunker forces you to make these under immense pressure, and it’s fantastic.

Before you get far enough to run into any situations like this, you’re faced with one of the game’s key mechanics, fuel. In the safe room sits the game’s one and only generator. It powers the bunker’s lighting system and runs on gas you can find scattered around the bunker. As expected, there is very limited fuel, and as expected, the bunker is extremely dark with the lights out.

This is a beautifully viscous design choice. Not only does it provide light, but it also acts as an alarm for whatever creature roams the bunker alongside you. The lights flicker and dim whenever it’s near, allowing you a few brief moments to hide or flee when you learn it’s nearby.

The light helps your visibility and survivability but it also reduces the time you’re forced to use Henri’s pitiful hand-cranked flashlight. The change time is low, requiring frequent use of both hands to wind it back up, and the noise it emits is loud enough to draw the beast straight to your location.

But of course, fuel is limited, and the rusty old generator drinks that fuel like water. Using fuel puts you on a time budget and a wasted trip out of the safe room where little progress is made feels like a huge loss in the best way. It raises the stakes in an otherwise already high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse. Do you go dark and conserve fuel? or do you pump all the gasoline you have into the generator and take an extended trip out? Forgot something in a room you’re familiar with? Kill the lights and sneak back there and save that precious resource for as long as you can.

But the fuel isn’t only for the generator. You can use it to create Molotov cocktails, or pour it out on the ground to start a fire or lay a trap for the monster that stalks you.  This leads into another great strength of Amnesia: The Bunker, its experimentation.

The Amnesia series has always had physics-based puzzled and environmental interaction like moving boxes or barring doors, but in The Bunker’s tighter, more crafted levels it really dives into that.

It’s made clear that there are multiple ways to navigate the game’s puzzles. You can blast locks, expending precious ammo, you can use explosive barrels to open doors, or if you’re brave enough, lure the Bunker’s beast to the door and have it smash it for you. Find a hallway packed with rabid, monstrous mice? Start a fire to get them out of there or throw a gas grenade to smoke them out.

There’s a decent amount of problem-solving you can do here which again reinforces the decision-making design of the game. However, there were more than a few times when I wasted exceedingly rare resources in an attempt to solve a problem, and they didn’t work. You can only shoot off some locks but not all, you can only explode doors with barrels, but you can’t dump gasoline on them and burn them down.  Moments like these were few and far between and one of the few sources of frustration to be had here, but don’t expect to get too creative in your puzzling as you play.

As you wrangle environmental puzzles, the ever-present beast is closing in on you.  It navigates the bunker through a series of tunnels that can be blocked if only temporality. It cannot be killed, but you may expend some ammo or other resources to defend yourself and buy a small window to escape.

The balance of pressure and reprieve from the beast is just right.

There are moments of genuine freedom from the monster. You can explore freely and take time to consider your next move. You never feel too harried by its pursuit, which enhances the moments when it’s actively stalking you. Make too much noise getting a door opened? You’ll hear the rabid groan of the thing heading your way. God forbid you fire your pistol, or the ricocheting echo it creates is like a spotlight on your location.

The beast doesn’t do anything too new or exciting in the realm of pursuing monsters, and I don’t think it needed to. It pursues, it responds to the noise you make, and it can be avoided or reactively dealt with in ways that feel fair and within the scope of Henri’s abilities.

The weightiness and minimum HUD adds to The Bunker’s tactile, analog feel. There’s a heavy quality to everything Henri does in the game. To crank the flashlight you must put away whenever an item is in your hands. It’s the same thing to heal, as you pop off the lid of a bandage and wrap your wounds. Want to carry a gas can? You need both hands to do that. This immersion carries over to your inventory. The blood on Henri’s left hand indicates how wounded he is, the bloodier the worse.

All these little touches go so far as to make Amnesia: The Bunker feel intimate, small in scale yet thoughtful in every design choice. Narrowing down the scope of the game has afforded the devs an opportunity to make a tightly-knit, perfectly paced slice of survivor horror.  This sets a new standard for what the Amnesia series is capable of.