One whiff of this and you’ll have your throat slit over the last tin of podcasts.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about The Bunker, an FMV adventure game with a surprising level of production value. We chose to cover this game partly because we had played it before, and there are several other things coming up that are going to take up a lot of our time, and also partly just to expose ourselves as people who keep really hoping for an FMV game to really knock our socks off. This didn’t manage that, but it still has some interesting qualities. Being a more modern game, The Bunker lacks the B-movie cheesiness that is honestly the selling point for a lot of older FMV titles these days, but having a focus on more of the filmic quality is a direction you rarely see these types of games go. Using actors with experience and some truly outstanding set design goes a long way to make the game feel more like a movie. More like a movie, in fact, that it does a game. The Bunker’s level of interaction is low. Barring one or maybe two instances, your choices have no impact on the plot unfolding, and most of the things that require player input could have easily been accomplished without it, making the interactivity feel like a token inclusion. While it doesn’t strike the perfect balance, or much of a balance at all, there is something that still feels pretty novel about it, and the story it tells is at worst competently executed and pretty interesting. We’re going to talk about how much interaction the game has and what impact it really makes, the environments in the game and how much they sell the premise, and we talk about the things that really don’t need to follow a schedule.
Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a short episode on a pretty short game because we are gearing up for some bigger things in the future and we wanted to maintain living while still being able to get them out in time. Still, this is at least kind of a strange one to look at right? FMV is a dying, some would say dead, subgenre and to see the amount of care put into making this feel like a modern piece of media gives me at least some respect for it. Have you played any FMV games in recent times? How do you think the genre holds up, and is there a way of making an interactive film like this more satisfying to play? Let us know over in the Discord or in the comments section! Next time, unless we find the inspiration to do some kind of filler between this and Zelda, we’re going to be talking about the Resident Evil 4 remake, so we hope you’ll join us then.