This article contains spoilers for Amnesia: The Bunker.

Amnesia: The Bunker is one of the best games I’ve played all year, and that is, in part, due to its commitment to a suitably bleak ending. The game makes you focus so single-mindedly on escaping the horror inside the titular cement prison that you forget the horror awaiting you on the outside.

Amnesia: The Bunker is set during World War 1, and players take on the role of Henri, a French soldier who, while trying to rescue his friend and fellow soldier, ends up trapped inside an abandoned bunker. A dying soldier tells him that there’s only one way out: he needs to clear the collapsed entrance with dynamite and a detonator. To get those things, he needs to explore the concrete labyrinth, delving into the barracks, the prison, the arsenal, maintenance, and ancient Roman tunnels to which the bunker is connected. As he explores, Henri needs to carefully manage his sound because there is a mysterious, terrifying monster inside the walls that will come out to attack if it hears him running by.

Escaping means the usual survival horror stuff. You need to find keys, codes, helpful objects like bolt cutters, and plentiful notes that will fill you in on the bunker’s macabre backstory and the whereabouts of important items. It’s a lot of fun, and scary too. But, unlike most survival horror games, Henri is aiming to escape the bunker to reach a place that is, arguably, even more dangerous.

That realization fully sinks in right before the credits. Having escaped the monster, Henri stumbles out into the light, then down a gravelly hill. Looking up at the bunker’s entrance, Henri sees the monster emerge, look around, then sprint off in another direction. (This is the ending I got. If you manage to kill the monster, it’s slightly different). You might breathe a momentary sigh of relief, until you hear the shouts of German soldiers running in your direction. The game begins with Henri narrowly dodging death on the battlefield and it ends with him (potentially) staring it down yet again. Death was deferred, never escaped.

Amnesia: The Bunker is the fourth Amnesia game — after The Dark Descent, A Machine for Pigs, and Rebirth — and the third developed by Frictional Games.

This is markedly different than the ending of one of this year’s other big survival horror games: Resident Evil 4 Remake. The goal of that game, similarly, is to escape. Leon is trapped in a larger “bunker” but his mission is the same. When the game ends, he rides off into the sunset with Ashley on the back of his jet ski. It’s a happy ending. Escape actually means escape.

Because Amnesia: The Bunker presents a similar goal, it’s easy to forget how different Henri’s circumstances are from Leon’s. Before he reaches the Bunker, Henri is already in life-threatening peril on the battlefield. There are periodic reminders of the peril outside throughout the campaign. The most significant one, for me, was venturing into a pillbox near the surface to recover a soldier’s dog tags. Doing so netted me a code which allowed me to unlock his locker. This was the first time that I had seen the sky in hours and I expected it to be a moment of reprieve. But, that expectation went out the window the first time I heard a bullet zing by me and hit the concrete. I don’t know if you can get killed during this sojourn to the outside and, given how long it took me to get there, I wasn’t going to find out. But either way it was a reminder of the dangerous frying pan that Henri had temporarily avoided in the bunker’s fire.

Though the game ends with some ambiguity — the soldiers could easily be running after the monster, not Henri — any pessimist playing the game will feel in their bones that Henri is dead. It’s an effective note of despair and doesn’t feel like it was cooked up out of thin air to give the game a horror ending. It’s there, in its bones, from the beginning of the story.

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Amnesia: The Bunker doesn't just make you run and hide.

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