Amnesia The Bunker is a grueling, methodical slog through mud, blood, and collapsing piles of splintered wood. A terrifying metaphor for the brutality of World War 1, Frictional has created one of the best Steam horror games in years, forcing you to deliberate over every decision, every resource, and every possible threat and blindspot as you painstakingly creep through its eponymous underground hellhole. It’s a relentless test of every single one of your nerves – except, of course, when you clip onto a flying shovel and finish the entire game in less than 90 seconds, which one intrepid Amnesia The Bunker speedrunner has managed to do already.
The Amnesia The Bunker map is a veritable maze, replete with sunken tunnels, locked passageways, and dark, foreboding alcoves just waiting, waiting, waiting for you to stroll by. Add to that the fact you’re being pursued by an enormous beast, and you’re trying to figure out how to save the prisoner, and you’ve got a verified ordeal on your hands.
But as it turns out, you can actually bypass basically all of that and just fly out of the bunker in less time than it’ll take you to read this article. We owe it all to speedrunner ‘Blood Thunder,’ who has been gradually deconstructing Amnesia The Bunker since its release.
Without factoring in the initial prologue and tutorial section, which teaches you how to use the gun, throw objects, and so on, Blood Thunder reaches the end of Amnesia in precisely one minute and 26 seconds. Watch the run below, and then we’ll explain how it works:
So, you will have noticed that Blood Thunder clips through the walls and then, ultimately, through the collapsed cliffside at the end of The Bunker, also. You’ll also have seen how the speedrunner picks up two items – a pillow and a shovel respectively – in order to activate and achieve the clipping.
It all comes down to collision detection, and an exploit that has been leftover in The Bunker from both Amnesia Rebirth and Frictional’s superlative sci-fi drama Soma.
When you pick up an item, it changes a flag in Amnesia’s code – held items cannot be allowed to intersect or clip into the player’s character model, so the game flags the item to make it entirely solid and impenetrable. So far, this is all business as normal.
However, when you drop an item, this flag is reset, and the item once again becomes something that the player character model can clip through. This is presumably designed so that, as you walk around in Amnesia The Bunker, you’re not constantly being stopped dead by small items that may be lying on the floor.
So what Blood Thunder does is pick up the item to disable all clipping, drop it to enable clipping again, but then quickly ‘re-grab’ it at such a speed that the game does not have time to once again disable clipping.
This allows Blood Thunder to push the item – in this case a pillow and then later a shovel – inside the character model. Amnesia The Bunker, however, does not like this. In a kind of blind panic, the game attempts to separate the character model and object via the quickest and most direct route, even if that means pushing the character model through a wall or into the air.
And hey presto, as the game tries to forcibly part Blood Thunder from the object they are holding, it pushes the speedrunner out of bounds, through most of the game’s environments, and to the ending door. Amnesia The Bunker? More like Amnesia The Ultra-Fast Speedrun-ker. Ugh. It’s going to take me a lot more than 90 seconds to feel better about that one.
If you’re planning to take on Frictional’s WW1 horror for real, you might want to know ‘how long is Amnesia The Bunker?’ We can also clue you into the Amnesia The Bunker detonator handle location, you know, because we’re kind that way.