I’ve played a lot of horror games, survived a lot of jump scares and defeated plenty of monsters. But the generator in Amnesia: The Bunker? That thing scares me.
The Bunker is a departure for Amnesia, a series usually focused on a tight narrative progression while evading some horror show of a monster that either has the right bones, or skin, but somehow never both. The Bunker, on the other hand, is a more open story where you wander a network of collapsed WW1 tunnels trying to escape. It has a much bigger focus on exploration and freedom of movement around its earthy subterranean corridors, and the generator is at the heart of it all.
Light ’em up
You see, you’re trapped in this underground maze, trying to find a way out while being pursued by a monstrous creature (Bones: okay. Skin: melty), and the generator is one of the few things you can use to help you survive. “It hates the light,” one of the notes left by a previous victim states and, as a result, much of your time is spent painstakingly keeping the generator running.
With the lights on, the beast doesn’t patrol or casually wander around – it generally only emerges from boltholes in the wall when you make too much noise. It makes light your friend, and the generator a relationship to nurture. It needs gas to run, and most of the opening hours of the game are spent desperately running back and forth to your little base room everytime you find jerry cans to top up the generator and keep it purring.
It will run out though, and when it does it’s one of the most honest to God, deep-in-the-gut feelings of terror I’ve felt in a long while. And that’s having spent the last couple of hours searching torn apart body chunks and hiding under beds while a giant, wendigo style creature pads around you, breathing like wind in a cave.
Underground, the darkness is absolute and the first time it descended I thought I’d triggered some in-game event. Only after a few seconds did the sudden, sinking realization dawn on me that I hadn’t checked my pocket watch. This clock syncs with the generator and tells you how much light you have left, and it rarely leaves your hand as you explore. No matter how far you push out and away from the generator, the little watch keeps it in your mind at all times. Have you got enough time to check one more room or should you head back? Have you even got enough time to head back?
Into the black
That first time I ended up in the dark I’d pocketed the watch to free up a hand and lost track of time. Idiot. That sinking feeling of absolute terror comes, in part, from the total blackness around you, but mostly from the fact that the generator is literally the only thing you have any control over and you messed up. Idiot. You have no say in where the beast is or what it’s doing, or where you need to go, but the one thing you can do is keep the lights on. IDIOT.
And when I use words like ‘absolute’ and ‘total’ to describe the darkness you inflict on yourself, I mean it. Without lights you can barely see more than a couple of feet in front of you. This isn’t the usual mildly inconvenient video game darkness you can bumble about in; this is the sort of blackness where you can get lost in a small room because you can’t find the edges. The first time the lights died, I did just that and ended up feeling my way around the walls trying to identify haphazard arrangements of box corners to find landmarks that might point home.
You do have a torch, but it’s a hand-cranked dynamo powered thing that whirs and rattles like a tin full of stones with every pull of its string. You can use it, and need to; but when the lights are out and the beast prowls, every yank on the cord conjures a curious growl from the darkness. Even with the lights on, winding it once can cause a rumble in the distant tunnels, and it takes at least three good pulls to get enough of a feeble beam to see anything. In the dark, you’re left with the agonizing gamble of noisily cranking the torch for the most meager crumb of light, knowing full well that if the sound doesn’t call claws from the shadows, the beam will.
Power down
And all because of the generator. Once it dies for the first time, it becomes a threat that weighs on the back of your mind for the rest of the game. Is it going to fail again? (Almost certainly.) Where will I be when it does? It changes the entire experience because while you start the game afraid of an unpredictable monster, you end up far more scared of your own predictable decisions. Will the choice to search one location over another cause the generator to run out? Should you go left or right at the junction to search out precious fuel? How am I going to mess this up in a way I can only blame myself for?
Plenty of games have some sort of thing you need to maintain to survive, from ammo or health, to the obviously similar torch batteries. But nothing quite cuts you off and abandons you in the way Amnesia: The Bunker’s generator does. There’s no checking the next room, or seeing what you can find if you keep going, that’s it until you can find gas and, crucially, find your way back. Frictional Games might be pushing the creature as the threat, but the real battle is, and will always be, between you and the generator – the real monster here. You can hide from the beast, or run away if you’re lucky, but there’s no escaping the dark and no one to blame but you when you plunge yourself into it.
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