With the 100th anniversary of "The War To End All Wars" having been in the last decade, there's been a little explosion of games in various genres that have been set in World War I. World War I survival horror games have actually started to become their own special little sub-genre, with stand-outs like Amnesiaa: The Bunker, Ad Infinitum (which I have not yet played), and the subject of this review, Conscript, as well as a few other smaller titles. World War I is such a brilliant thematic setting for a survival horror game, that it really does kind of surprise me that nobody thought of this before.
First and foremost, World War I is often considered to be a tragic war. It was fought for stupid, asinine reasons, with no clear good guys or bad guys, and the loss of life ultimately ended up being even more pointless than usual for a war. It was also the first war to employ horrific new industrial weapons that multiplied the pain, suffering, and death compared to every war previously fought. From machine guns, to tanks, to airplanes, to the various gases that were so horrific that they were banned by the international community in the fallout of the war. And more superficially, the trenches and bunkers that are an iconic part of the imagery of the war are tight, enclosed, and claustrophobic spaces that are dark, dirty, and full of death, rot, and vermin. All of these circumstances and aesthetics of the war combine to make it an ideal thematic setting for horror -- in retrospect.
Conscript may be the ultimate realization of the war as a horror setting. Conscript is grounded and presents the war as horrific in its own regard. Unlike Amnesia, Conscript doesn't really rely on supernatural monsters or Eldritch gods to try to make the war scarier than it already is. It's just you, the trenches, and an army of German soldiers between you and survival. And survival will not come easy!
The trenches of World War I are an inherently horrifying setting.
Saving Private Piérre
The basic setup of Conscript is a little evocative of Saving Private Ryan. You play as one of a pair of brothers conscripted into the French army to defend Fort Souville and prevent the Germans from capturing the town of Verdun. On the way to the front lines to defend from a German advance, you find your brother critically injured and unconscious. During the skirmish, you are injured and left for dead while the rest of the French army retreats and temporary abandons the fort to regroup for a counter-attack. After waking from your injuries alone in a corpse pit, you find that the trenches are slowly being overrun by German troops, your brother is missing, and the player character vows to find him and protect him, so that you can both return home to your mother.
This leads the player to start exploring the maze-like web of trenches connected to Fort Souville in search of your brother. Locked doors and other obstacles block progress, in typical survival horror fashion, and you'll have to scavenge for whatever supplies you can find to help defend yourself from the German soldiers who have started occupying and patrolling the trenches and fort.
In classic survival horror fashion, doors will be locked by themed keys or puzzles.
The game is played from a top-down perspective, with pixel-art, which also limits your visibility and awareness of what is around you (also in typical, classic, survival horror fashion). Aiming and firing a weapon is slow and cumbersome, and the weapons must be manually reloaded after every shot. There are no zombies or monsters; just human German soldiers. At first, they will be easy to kill with a single shot or two from your rifle or shotgun, but within a couple hours of play, you'll start running into tougher, armored shock troopers that will require multiple shots to take down. The slow nature of firing and reloading your weapon means that enemies charging you at melee are far more threatening than you might expect. "Never bring a knife to a gunfight" you might say? Well, not if the gun is a World War I rifle, it seems. Furthermore, any time you are up against multiple enemies, it will turn into a desperate scramble to keep distance from the melee troops and find cover from riflemen within the tight confines of the trenches.
Bandages and first aid kits are also in short supply. Every bash that you take from a German trench baton, or graze from a rifle shot, will whittle down your health and ratchet up the tension, as you can ill afford to take more hits. The game will provide more healing items later on (as well as ample opportunity to craft more), but health recovery will always feel tight. I finished the game with [I think] only 2 healing items remaining in my item box; though, I could have bought the ingredients to craft a few more, if I absolutely needed to.
You'll need to be paying attention to what you're doing, and have fast reflexes to either dodge surprise enemy attacks, or quickly dispatch them. The enemies here won't insta-kill you like in a hide-and-seek horror game. You have a health bar, and can take quite a beating. The Germans, however, will be more than happy to dish out those beatings if you give them an opportunity. A single screw up won't get you immediately killed, but sloppy play can quickly turn fatal, as even the most basic grunts can be lethal if you get careless and expose yourself to multiple attacks.
All of this is near perfectly encapsulated by the exceptionally-designed and stressfully-paced opening chapter or 2 of the game. All of the game's best ideas and mechanics really shine in these first few hours and left me with an immaculate first impression of the game. But by the mid-point of the game, nags and nitpicks did start to pile up.
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