Amnesia: The Bunker
It's rare that I abandon games in the middle, because I carefully choose what I play. Time is valuable! In this case it seemed I made a solid pick: I enjoy much of the Frictional Games catalog. But the bottom line is that I do not like The Bunker.
On the surface it seems to be less of a walking-sim, like the rest of the Amnesia series, and more survival horror, like Frictional's early Penumbra games. What you might not realize before buying is how brutally the bare-bones formula is applied here. What formerly was a gameplay element is now the entire game.
Specifically, The Bunker is all about hiding from randomly distributed and randomly appearing enemies, looking for randomly located objects, and managing a tiny amount of resources with a very limited carrying capacity. And you're constantly on timers for dwindling fuel and batteries. It's just anxiety, all anxiety, all the time. There are some puzzles, but you're unable to consider them at your own pace.
My gameplay loop essentially consisted of "raids" out of the (only) safe space: Go explore, collect some items until my pockets were full, return to safe space. Progress was slow and halting. The randomly appearing enemies were scary the first few times, but later just annoying as I would simply run away or hide until they moved on. The bottom line is that the enemies are arbitrary obstacles rather than satisfying challenges.
Alas, the story is cliché and uncompelling from the very beginning. After getting tired of the gameplay loop in a couple of hours, I realized I didn't care enough to push through to the end. It would be just more of the same.
Skip this one.
I wish I could say: Play the demo first to see if you like it, but apparently Frictional removed the demo from Steam. It's easy to guess why: The Bunker is a game that lends itself to just a couple of hours of play, maybe for streamers to scream on camera and then move on. I imagine a lot of people played the demo, enjoyed it for what it was, but didn't feel a need to play a full game of it. So, no sale for Frictional. That's just the kind of game this is, better suited to be a free demo than a full experience. It's simply not what I'm looking for.