Highlights
- Amnesia: The Bunker is receiving a major update in October, making the already stressful game even more unforgiving with a new Shell Shocked mode.
- The Shell Shocked mode will remove the pause when opening the inventory and make previously impregnable doors wooden, adding extra challenges to the game.
- The Halloween update will introduce new features such as randomized locations of corpses, new achievements, and resources added to boxes. It's a good opportunity for both newcomers and series veterans to experience the horror game.
Amnesia: The Bunker is getting a big update slated for the second half of October, a senior official at Frictional Games has confirmed. The incoming patch for one of the best horror games on Xbox Game Pass is slated to release just in time for the 2023 Halloween.
While even the day-one version of Amnesia: The Bunker delivered a fairly stressful campaign, its next update will make the game even more unforgiving. That's largely due to the inclusion of a new Shell Shocked mode meant to one-up the already taxing experience of Amnesia: The Bunker's Hard difficulty, which itself comes with a provision that it's only intended for players "craving an intense nightmare."
Frictional Games Creative Lead Fredrik Olsson has now shed more light on the contents of the incoming update in a recent series of tweets, which included a revelation that the Shell Shocked mode will no longer pause the game when the player opens the inventory. The actual pause menu will still work because "we're not that evil," Olsson wrote. Casting some doubt on that assessment is the fact that the gun in Amnesia: The Bunker won't be in the player's inventory but stowed away in a locker at the start of a Shell Shocked playthrough.
If that doesn't sound traumatic enough, the new difficulty will also turn some of the previously impregnable doors throughout the game wooden, including the entrance to the administration office. The change will make the closest thing that Amnesia: The Bunker has to a safe room even less safe. Olsson said that the Shell Shocked mode will still include a tiny "panic room" that will be unreachable by the game's boogeyman, but without elaborating on that "little secret." New and randomized locations of corpses, bunker rats, and dog tags will also be part of the package, making each playthrough uniquely stressful.
In an effort to alleviate those difficulties, the Halloween update will randomly add resources to some of the game's many boxes, incentivizing players to make noise—which is generally a really bad idea—by breaking them. The extra challenges of the Shell Shocked mode will also be available as adjustable options in the game's self-explanatory Custom difficulty mode, another feature that's set to debut as part of the Halloween update. Finally, Olsson confirmed that the patch will introduce several new achievements, including one for beating Amnesia: The Bunker on the Shell Shocked difficulty.
Apart from its potential to attract newcomers, the incoming update to Amnesia: The Bunker should also provide a good excuse for the series veterans to revisit the fourth installment in the franchise just in time for the spookiest holiday of the year. The 2023 title might also be the final opportunity for fans to play through an unadulterated horror experience by Frictional, not least because the Amnesia developer says it's planning to move away from horror games in the foreseeable future.
Amnesia: The Bunker is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
