I own too many video games I haven’t played. In a new series that will encourage me to play and finish the ones I have as well as get some writing practice, I will be going through my backlog. The rules? I don’t need to finish the game, but I must play at least two hours, and must write my thoughts about it. First up, Amnesia: The Bunker
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a game shoot itself in the foot by using a tooltip in a loading screen. Amnesia: The Bunker, the latest in the Amnesia series by Frictional Games, commits its biggest sin with the following “hint” that appears often when continuing from a save:
“You can overcome most obstacles in multiple ways. Use your wits and your brains. Experiment. If you think something might be possible to do, it probably is.”
There’s no doubt that Frictional Games’ in-house engine has an impressive amount of interactivity across all titles, but The Bunker takes it several steps further. Unfortunately, it is still a video game, and that means there are limits to available interactions. The most frustrating aspect of this message is that it is an unforced error: the game clearly plays with the design language of Immersive Sims, something that is easily readable by those familiar with the genre and likely to pass over the heads of those that aren’t. With this tooltip, the game invites the player to experiment with things with the expectation of a level of interactivity that simply does not exist. Very early in the game, there is a cabinet with a well-worn chain blocking your access to it. Having read the above, I dragged a heavy brick over to the door, and began throwing it against the chain. The brick limply toppled off the chain, rattling the door but not opening it. I tried this several times, unsure if I was simply aiming poorly or if I had somehow encountered a bug or was using the wrong input. After wasting a few minutes on these attempts, I looked it up: sure enough, I needed a specific tool to get past this chain.
This immediately creates a friction with the player and the game: my first experiment was a failure, and thus I am less likely to learn into experimentation in the future and stick to tried and true methods. This kind of statement might sting less in a game like Deus Ex or Dishonored where saving is cheap and resources are plentiful, but in Amnesia: The Bunker, there is (mostly) one save point, and wasting a resource can be catastrophic. Simply removing that language and allowing the expectation that out-of-the-box thinking may be rewarded via environmental hints would have gone such long way in encouraging players to experiment within the confines of a more realistic expectation of interactivity.
All this said, Amnesia: The Bunker is still a massively impressive showing by Frictional. The game is a nerve shredding puzzle box, full of genuinely terrifying moments and surprising mechanical depth. From a team that has generally opted to forgo deep interactivity for the sake of mood and story, it’s a breath of fresh air to see they’ve learned all the right lessons from 2014 horror classic Alien: Isolation. Despite the tooltip fumble, this was an energizing and worthwhile kickoff to the quest to bring my backlog into line.