In videogames many developers strive for realism. They spend hours working on hair movement and making lighting look natural. No matter how much developers work on this though it will never match real life. Real life will always look more realistic than a videogame. With that theory a videogame made up of filmed footage (otherwise known as a FMV game) would be the perfect way to create something that looks realistic, surely? In some ways yes but, as The Bunker proves, it takes a lot more than a camera and actors to make a game realistic.
The Bunker starts with a frantic chain of events occurring. After the introduction though you are introduced to the first example of its limitations. Sarah Greene, who plays the mother of the lead character, is relatively young. When the game jumps 30 years into the future and she’s playing an older version of her previously shown character it’s quite jarring as the makeup just isn’t strong enough. It looks like a young woman with some old person makeup on.
For a small throwaway section this would be easy to ignore, but it’s quite a pivotal part of the plot. As the game progresses the makeup is, for the most part, perfectly fine, as is the lighting and prop design. The big issues are surprisingly the movement from section to section. Despite the game being live-action, the movement feels stilted. The lead stands stiffly in a corridor awaiting you to tell them what to do. You’ll click to go somewhere and sometimes you’ll come in from a camera angle that doesn’t make sense continuity wise.
The stiffness of movement is also met with some bizarre animation loops. Rather than leaving the camera rolling to get a loop that lasts a while, it seems they opted for looping back and forth. The issue with this is reversing footage makes body movement noticeably unnatural. It’s not all doom and gloom for The Bunker though. There are some positives to take away from it.
Story wise it is an intriguing tale of isolation at the end of the world. Adam Brown, who plays John, does a great job in playing a 30 year old man that has been raised in isolation, even though his voice-over falls flat at times. He handles portraying the drama that unfolds well and there’s a timid child like charm to his interpretation of the character. The rest of the cast put in some solid performances throughout the story too. It’s not a Hollywood blockbuster in terms of production by any means, but it feels like a competent TV mini-series. It may be a linear tale, but it’s one that brings with it some intrigue, as well as some nice looking shots. You can tell it was created using a relatively small budget, but there are some really nice moments there.
Its linearity creates roadblocks with documents and other items dotted around to find, but these are fairly limited. It mainly slows your progress via Quick Time Events. Rather than just a button prompt, though you’ll be encouraged to move a cursor and press buttons from time to time. It doesn’t feel natural unfortunately, although I could see it working on a touch device quite well. There also doesn’t seem to be an accessibility option for those that can’t mash buttons, which is a shame considering the interactive movie nature of the game would bring in many kinds of gamers.
- Along with a lack of accessibility the game also brings with it a lack of stability, at least in the builds for review. I completely lost my save on PlayStation 4 right near the end of the game, which will hopefully be a bug that very few people will encounter. It also seemed on a few occasions not to register button clicks. With the game clocking in at reasonably short two and a half hours, as well as being a fairly straight run from A to B, it’s hard to ignore these technical issues.
Overall The Bunker is a game with big ideas that fails to reach the heights it obviously wants to. The stiffness of movement and animation loops, coupled with the continuity errors and the awkward gameplay means it is constantly drawing you out from being truly immersed in the game. There are things that The Bunker does right and it is definitely an interesting experiment that some may enjoy, but it falls in to all the usual trappings of the genre whilst failing to bring anything that feels new. Hopefully the developers realise the shortcomings of the game and use it to improve on future projects if they continue to work within the FMV genre. The potential is definitely there.
- You can watch me play through a bit of The Bunker below. In it I mess with some options and explore my surroundings a bit. Spoilers.