The Bunker does a good job of adding bits of game play to an FMV game. Most FMV games I have played usually only involve dialogue choices where The Bunker has little in the way of dialogue choices. It does have some QTE events as well as some point and click aspects to it. They work well to break up the videos. I had read some people thought hat the QTE sections could be too difficult because they needed to push the buttons faster than they were able to but I never encountered this. Whether this was due to a patch fixing the issue or due to me just having better reflexes I’m not sure but I didn’t find them hard at all. The acting was really well done but I will give special praise to Adam Brown who played the main character of John. The reason I found he did so well was that John never got to socialize with kids his own age and has spent years almost on his own other than his mother and Brown did a good job of showing someone who was a bit off in that regard. Not quite childlike or dumb but certainly stunted in a few ways. The music was also very well done and helped with the game’s tension. The plot was good and only got better as the game went on. It started a little slow but as the game showed you more lore; back story and revealed story twists I enjoyed it more and more. The production values were very good. If I could have changed a few things it would have been to have more of an epilogue. I would also like to have had more dialogue choices or story branching but to be fair this would have needed more characters as John spends most of the game on his own.
I played The Bunker on Linux using Proton. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. The game ran very well although it did use a strange amount of RAM. At it’s peak it used more than pretty much any AAA game I have played and certainly more than most FMV games I have played. That being said I have 16GB of RAM so this wasn’t an issue. The game auto saves when you exit and there is only one save slot. I don’t love this system but at the same time this is a linear game so it isn’t a huge deal. Alt-tab didn’t work.
Game Engine: Unity
Disk Space Used: 5.5 GB
Input Used: Keyboard and Mouse
Game Settings Used: 2560x1440
GPU Usage: 12-30 %
VRAM Usage: 2006-2360 MB
CPU Usage: 6-12 %
RAM Usage: 5.0-11.4 GB
Frame Rate: 157-165 FPS
If you enjoy FMV games I recommend The Bunker. It is more linear than many games in the genre but the plot is fantastic as are the production values. It does try to add some variety that others lack as well. I finished the game in one hour and fifty five minutes and paid $5.49 CAD and can say it is easily worth it’s current price tag of $19.49.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 23.1.3 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.4.1-zen1-1-zen | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165hz | Proton 8.0-2