If you are of a certain age, you may have had dreams like this: dreams in which the men in the masks come, in which the world is poisoned and you're dragged away to some hole in the ground to escape from the toxic sky. It was always the men in the masks that really stuck with me: a fear of the faceless agents who would usher in the radioactive apocalypse. A fear sharpened, perhaps, by that brilliant moment in ET - itself a film not untouched by the Cold War - in which the mother tries to protect her children while the astronauts advance through her house. Not towards her: around her. A nightmare made worse through its own peculiar focal point.
The Bunker does a lot with ideas like this - with the safety suits, the violations and all the other trappings of the bomb. The bomb has long since fallen here, in fact, and you play as John, a thirty-year-old man who was born in a shelter and has lived his entire life down there. Now, nobody else is left but him, and the first few minutes of this likably earnest game drop you into his sleepwalking daily routine: taking vitamins (captivity has turned John into a thirty-year-old boy who still winces and almost whimpers when he has to swallow a pill), measuring radiation, reading to his mother (definitely not as sweet as it sounds), and counting the remaining tins of horrible bully beef-style dinner he has left.
John, we gather, is sensitive and fearful, cowed by his shut-away life into a state of profound incuriosity about the world. And we gather all this not just through the beats of the script, which steadily starts to develop a mystery for him to get to the bottom of, but through the performance of Adam Brown, a wonderfully lugubrious actor whose sunken eyes and taut mouth will make him a shoo-in for any big budget movie about the life of George Orwell. The Bunker isn't just a throwback to Cold War fantasies, in other words: it's a point-and-click adventure game of sorts, albeit a very streamlined one, that plays out with live action clips seamlessly edited together as you move a mouse around a superimposed UI, hefting keys into locks, say, selecting which desk drawer to investigate, shuffling from one room to another as the small environment comes into focus, or stabbing away at a button to ease open an old hatch.
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