Amnesia: The Bunker’s monster has been the scourge of many a player, but as revealed by the game’s creative lead, it used to be much, much worse.
How could Amnesia: The Bunker’s monster be any nastier? Could it be bigger? Faster? Fire laser beams from its eyes? None of those. Delving into an earlier version of the game, creative lead Fredrik Olsson explained that the monster used to set traps for players.
“One little thing that we cut from the early version of Amnesia: The Bunker was the ‘stalker trapping mechanic’ — where the stalker would sometimes place fuel outside of a hole and wait for the player to go for it,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Why fuel? Because the main thing that keeps the monster away is light, but keeping the bunker lit requires fuel. If you run out of fuel, you’re in big trouble. So, the idea was that if you saw a fuel can, you’d be tempted to take the bait.
To stop players from wising up, the monster wouldn’t be doing this all the time, “it was planned to be a very rare event and only increase chances of happening later on in the game in order to minimize predictability,” added Olsson.
Related: How Long to Beat Amnesia: The Bunker
The feature was ultimately dropped because it was out of character for the monster. As is, the monster is utterly bestial fury and blood. It wants to murder you and doesn’t have much more of an agenda than that. Making it smarter could make it less terrifying.
Still, I’m curious to see just how this would have panned out. And, going by the response to the original post, a few commentators were impressed by just how evil this little mechanic could have been. You can follow Olsson on Twitter for more fun and/or terrifying Amnesia: The Bunker insights.
