Not to be confused with The Bunker Diary.
The game provides examples of:
- After the End: Set after a nuclear war that killed off most of Britain, and probably most of the world.
- Apocalypse How: Class 1 or 2, little is known about the outside world other than that within 6 years, the handful of other shelters in radio contact with the main characters have all failed from various problems, ranging from air filter failure to radiation leak to fuel for the generator running out. The last remaining shelter succumbs to infighting over the last of their food by October 1992 and that's the last anyone has heard from the outside world.
- Apocalyptic Log: Along with John's memories, these are the only clues as to what really happened in the bunker.
- Alternate History: Set in an alternate Britain where the Cold War turned hot in the late 80s.
- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: The inventory clerk who works for The Commissioner is one of these, being constantly brow-beaten to keep quiet about how bad things actually look for the shelter.
- Bolivian Army Ending: John either remains behind in the shelter which is starting to fail, or leaves for the outside world with a broken arm and no outdoor survival skills
- Born After the End: Main character John Edmunds is born in the eponymous government bunker at the very moment nuclear missiles begin to detonate across the United Kingdom. With the world outside too irradiated for anyone to leave, he spent his entire childhood knowing nothing but the world inside the bunker. For good measure, he was the only child in the facility and only tolerated because his mother was one of only two doctors in the entire bunker, so he had no friends apart from the improvised toys he was given. As an adult, John suffers from an obsession with rules and routine due to his upbringing and will follow all instructions to the letter — even warning the rest of the bunker via the Tannoy when he has to turn off main power despite being the only resident left alive.
- Crapsack World: As bad as you'd expect in a post-apocalyptic world. Gets even worse when the bunker inhabitants realize they're going to run out of food and they start dying from an unknown illness. However, they dont have time to turn on eachother as they all die off too quickly.
- Creature of Habit: John is this thanks to his mother drilling it into him that he must stick to his routine in order to stay safe. He even makes an announcement before shutting off the power despite the fact that there's no one left alive to hear it.
- Did Not Think This Through: The shelter had been cobbled together in six weeks, and didn't have nearly enough supplies to outlast the effects of a nuclear war. Had it not been for the massive deaths, the remaining food would only have lasted little over a year by the time John reached late childhood. Judging by the reports of the other shelters, which all failed within 6 years of the war, this was a problem everywhere else too.
- Disappeared Dad: John's father is never mentioned.
- Fallout Shelter Fail: It's eventually discovered that the eponymous government fallout shelter was just one of a whole series of botch jobs: because nobody ever believed there'd be a nuclear war, construction went to the lowest possible bidder and was polished off in about six weeks, meaning that the shelters started falling to pieces almost immediately after they were occupied. All the others have already failed by the start of the game, with final reports mentioning filtration problems, radiation leaks, and fights over dwindling resources. John's bunker seems to be the exception: it manages to hold together for at least thirty years before experiencing faults in the filtration system, and there's enough supplies to keep John going until external radiation levels are safe for him to leave the bunker. However, this only because his mother fatally poisoned all the other residents, reducing the stress on the internal systems and leaving enough food to sustain the two of them for the next three decades.
- Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter:
- The game kicks off with one of these already in progress, with various official personnel hurrying into the eponymous government fallout shelter well ahead of a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. However, one of the medical staff is in labor and has to be wheeled straight from the entrance to the bunker's infirmary, where she gives birth to main character John Edmunds at almost the exact moment that the bombs detonate.
- Thirty years later, John can find a report from the Prime Minister's Wiltshire bunker, stating that they experienced similar frantic rushes for the facility, with the PM arriving safely ahead of the blast, while most of the domestic staff were killed before they could reach the shelter. The same report also mentions that a group of fifty civilians fled for the bunker and tried to break in during the final minutes prior to the attack. They didn't succeed and the report indicates that the group was killed in the blast.
- Inverted during the finale; after suffering a Fallout Shelter Fail due to years of strain on the bunker's internal systems, John has to escape from the bunker before he dies of radiation exposure.
- Foreshadowing: The missing Lindane bottles in one of the flashbacks. John's mother had used it to create a poison.
- Game-Breaking Injury: John breaks his arm while trying to fix some failing steam vent equipment. As he's the only living human around, this is bad, and its a nasty injury too, with the bone fragment breaking the skin, though he has enough medical skill and supplies to patch himself up. He's forced to perform the rest of the game without the use of his hand.
- General Ripper: The Commissioner in charge of the bunker is set up as this. Turns out he's not the villain at all, just kind of a jerk.
- Inelegant Blubbering: John sports this twice - once in the opening scene, and again while setting the bone on his compound fracture, the first bring reflective of his being a Manchild, the second from the pain of his injury.
- Knight Templar Parent: John's mother was the one who killed all the other inhabitants of the bunker, so there would be enough food for her and her son.
- Manchild: Justified since John hasn't had any human contact with anyone except his mother since late childhood.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The man in the gas mask in John's flashbacks is heavily hinted at being the killer who murdered the other inhabitants. He's not, he's actually the Commissioner. The mask is to protect him from the gas John's mother released in the air vents
- The Medic: The bunker has two of them; a male doctor and John's mom.
- Mummies at the Dinner Table: John insists on continuing to read to his mother, despite her being quite obviously dead and in an advanced state of decay. It's not because he's under the impression that she's still alive, though; rather, John's just so fixated on routine, he doesn't have any idea what else to do with her.
- My God, What Have I Done?: John has been repressing his memory of assisting his mother in killing the other shelter inhabitants and personally shooting the Commissioner to save his mother. When he's forced to return to Level 5 to escape the bunker decades later, he has a minor breakdown when he's forced to relive the trauma, having realized just what his mother had tasked him to do.
- Non-Standard Game Over: Two:
- After John breaks his arm and stitches himself up, he climbs down the escape hatch. If he isn't careful, he loses his grip on the ladder and falls to his death.
- In a flashback, the Commissioner corners Margaret and John after everyone else is killed. He then begins strangling Margaret. If John does not help her by shooting the Commissioner, the game ends there because Margaret has to survive in order for the events in the present to unfold.
- Ragnarök Proofing: Averted, most of the other government bunkers failed quickly, either due to mechanical failure or lack of resources. John's bunker held out, mostly because the deaths of almost everyone inside, significantly reducing the stress on the systems. However, soon after John's mother dies, the bunker begins to leak radiation...
- The Reveal: The inhabitants of the shelter were all killed by Margaret, John's mother, who had John place a jar of toxic fluid near the ventilation pump, killing everyone except her, John and The Commissioner, who tried to kill them in revenge, only to be shot by John
- Room Full of Zombies: Played with. When John is forced to return to Level 5 to escape the bunker, he has to retrieve the key from the corpse of the Commissioner. His, and everyone else's bodies are stored inside a freezer, and John has a hallucination of all the dead rising up and accusing him of killing them. Which he technically did.
- The Plague: An unknown plague begins affecting the survivors in the bunker about a decade after the war. The symptoms are similar to radiation poisoning but there is no contamination in the air or water supply, and the doctors don't have enough equipment to study it more thoroughly. Its not a plague at all - John's mother has been poisoning the affected as a test run for killing everyone off
- Posthumous Character: John's mother, Margaret, dies in the first few minutes of the game, we learn more about her through flashbacks.
- Press X to Not Die: Your first action in the game upon being born - "Breathe". Your final action in the game if you choose to leave the bunker is to take your very first breath of non-filtered air in your entire life. The game then cuts to black
- Sanity Slippage: With the loss of his mother, John completely loses contact with reality. His final moments of the game is spent hallucinating that all the people who died in the bunker wants to drag him back and force him to die with them, including his mother
- Unwitting Pawn: John set up a jar full of Lindane extract near air filtration system to create a toxic vapor to kill everyone in the bunker except him and his mother without knowing what he'd done until he saw the bodies, making his mother's instructions to never leave their first level far more insidious in hindsight.
- Unreliable Narrator: John. The early flashbacks we see are very misleading, hinting at a man in a gas mask killing the bunkers inhabitants. It was actually John and his mother
- Wham Line: "Accounting for the losses to spoilage and radiation... about 14 months of food left"
- "How long until we can go topside?" "20-30 years."
- "It's been 16 months since our last contact with another shelter"
- A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: John's mother Margaret appears to be a kind, level-headed woman who manages to stay sane when things in the bunker start going badly. She turns out to be the cause of many of the bunker's problems because she is poisoning people in order to save the bunker's food supply for herself and John.
