Amnesia: The Bunker was provided by Frictional Games for review. Thank you!
The first-person horror masters are back at it with Amnesia: The Bunker. You are Henri Clément, a French soldier that finds himself left alone in a desolate bunker during WW1. Traveling through the semi open-world bunker, you will need to scavenge, craft, and sneak your way around while avoiding making too much noise to attract what is hunting you. Will you be able to escape from the horrific monster lurking within this cursed bunker? Only one way to find out!
If I could describe Amnesia: The Bunker in a few words, I would say…horrifying, fear-inducing, and amazing. Frictional Games has created one of their best survival horror games, rivaling, or even exceeding in some areas, The Dark Descent. The Bunker is a departure from their other titles, giving you ways to fight back and more ways to get creative to achieve your goals, but it doesn’t lose that charm the series has always had.
On top of this, the setting is phenomenal, the sound design is spot on, and the creature AI is well made. I don’t think there was one moment where I wasn’t scared or at least tense walking through the dimly lit, dated bunker. There is also some randomization involved, so replaying the game will feel a bit different each time. Overall, this is the best Amnesia game to date and I highly recommend it to all horror fans. This is quite playable on the Steam Deck as well, but there are some caveats.
Amnesia: The Bunker – Steam Deck Performance
The opening scene for Amnesia: The Bunker, which takes place outside the bunker, is one of the more power-hungry areas of the game, yet it only takes place for a couple minutes. Once you are inside the bunker, everything becomes much more playable, so with that in mind, I will be optimizing for the inside of the bunker.
First thing to get out of the way though, yes the game has some graphical issues. While there are minor ones that happen here and there, the biggest is the issues on your left hand. As long as you’re holding something in your left hand, this will show up. More than likely, this is something that can be fixed via a patch or Proton update, but as of right now, it is still there.
Other than this, the game runs really well for how great it looks, but it was quite hard choosing my recommended build. I wanted to push framerate as much as possible, but there are too many moments in the game where there can be drops. Especially in certain sections of the Maintenance area and when there’s fire, even at lowest settings and no caps, framerate can drop to 52 – 55 FPS, sometimes even as low as 43. So, with that in mind, I elected a 40 FPS high visual quality build that sticks to 40 and looks amazing and keeps battery averaged to 11W – 13W.
With that in mind, I also elected to make a 60 FPS build, but it does have some moments where framerate can drop. Overall, the game does stick to 60 for the majority of the areas, but the drops can definitely be felt more when they do happen. To keep it stable, we also need to lower resolution a bit, but FSR looks pretty nice here, so I wouldn’t say its bad. We will, however, need a higher TDP limit to keep the framerate.
The game supports 16:10 resolutions, so there are no black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and it has full controller support. There are no cloud saves here, but there is a spot for custom campaigns. The store page says there is Steam Workshop support, but there isn’t a spot for it yet on Steam, so that may come a little later.
Conclusion
Amnesia: The Bunker is one of the best horror games I have played in recent times. Frictional Games has created a fantastic semi-open sandbox that expands what an the series can be while keeping the charm and horror from the older titles. If you’re looking for a premium survival horror experience, this is going to be the game you get. It does have a couple of issues on the Steam Deck, especially the graphical ones on the left hand, but the game is playable and will be a fantastic addition to the library once those issues clear up.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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