'The Bunker' Is 'Her Story' With A Dwarf from 'The Hobbit'

Her Story won all of the awards in the world for bringing Full Motion Video back to gaming, so it should come as no surprise that 2016 will bring a flood of games coming back into this space. If you missed FMV back in the ‘90s, a bunch of people got way too excited about CD-Rom technology and made games that were built on super-highly compressed video files. None of these aged well, but they weren’t particularly good in the first place. So there’s a mix of nostalgia involved, but also technology is finally catching up to the form, allowing this new influx of FMV gaming to have a lot of promise. And The Bunker is oozing with potential.

This new game, coming to mobiles and consoles, features a survivor in a bunker who has managed to avoid a nuclear apocalypse. Now, combined with the tired gaming cliche of amnesia, he must figure out how to survive, escape, or whatever it is that people tend to do in horror scenarios.

The fully live-action psychological horror adventure features Adam Brown (The Hobbit) alongside Sarah Greene (Penny Dreadful) in an experience that claims to use zero CGI and be a completely practical-effects-driven experience.

That’s pretty cool. If a horror movie did that in 2016, I’d be stoked. A horror game trying a new interactive system? That’s a reason for excitement. Amnesia? Less so.

Filmed on location in Essex in an actual decommissioned bunker, this game promises secrets, puzzles, cameos from Game of Thrones and Star Wars actors, and a script from the minds behind The Witcher, SOMA, and Broken Sword. This is such a delightful confluence of talent I really don’t know how things could go wrong — other than succumbing to the problems that have always plagued FMV.

So let’s see what developer Splendy Games can do.

Release Date: Summer 2016 (PC), Q3 2016 (Console), Q4 2016 (Mobile / Tablet)

Update: Splendy Games informed us that John isn’t experiencing amnesia, but rather “he has suppressed memories of the past as they were so horrific.” So hey, that’s another step in the right direction.