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.

I've been extra late at picking up this year's slate of EA football games. By the time I finally got around to ordering a pre-owned and pre-played copy of College Football 27 (and saved myself over $20 in the process!), Madden had just released. In the meantime, I took another dive into my PS5 and PC backlog. The beneficiary of my PC backlog dive is a colony-builder from a couple years ago named Land of the Vikings.

As the name suggests, this game is a city/colony-builder with a viking theme. Not only are you expected to build a thriving Norse colony, but you'll also have to send ships out to trade with and raid neighboring villages. I was hoping for "Manor Lords, but with vikings". What I got was far less.

Manor Lords with vikings? Sign me up!

Roads less travelled

The greatest strength of Land of the Vikings is that it is a little more expressive than some other colony-builders. First and foremost, it is a grid-less colony-builder, meaning you can place buildings and roads anywhere on the map, at any angle, and the roads can curve organically. This immediately sets this game apart from something like Farthest Frontier, which is constrained to a grid and 90-degree angles, and suffers for it.

Land of the Vikigns also offers a decent number of decorative objects, and these objects even have various functions. This game doesn't have the customizable, modular buildings of Foundation, which is a shame. Being able to at least customize the Longhouse would have been nice. Instead, you'll have to settle for being able to customize your trade ships and warships, which is sadly a feature that I can't review, because it didn't work for me when I played the game. I bought the customization upgrades in the technology tree, but the button to customize my ships was still grayed out in all my docks. So one of the big selling points of the game just flat-out didn't work for me.

Thankfully, the regular decorations did work, and I was able to place these in my village. Decorations are broadly divided into 4 functional categories. Some decorations make villagers happier, others improve the village's defenses, others increase the storage capacity of buildings, and still others make the village appear wealthier. These decorations don't need to be specifically placed next to the buildings that they upgrade, as they can be placed anywhere you want, giving you quite a bit of freedom to make the village look how you want.

There are some disappointing limitations to the decorations. There aren't any chairs, tables, or benches, so I couldn't make any kind of outdoor dining area for my tavern, or any kind of communal hang-out spot outside the Longhouse.

I particularly like the idea of placing signs and banners along roads to speed up movement along those roads. This is a feature that I would love to see implemented in other colony builders. They look nice on their own, but the fact that they actually do make travel along the roads faster and more efficient is a really cool feature.

Signposts, banners, and wagons will speed up movement along roads.

Placing wooden carts along roads also supposedly improves movement speed. Presumably, this is an abstraction for the villager using those carts to move goods. Personally, I would much prefer if the game had a wainwright building to make useable wooden carts and wagons, but I guess I'll take what I can get.

The game also requires that you build torches and braziers to light the village at night, which is an idea that I also really like, and which I think more games like this should employ. Without enough light, villagers will actually complain. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really give any feedback (that I could find) that tells the player where light is needed or how much light should be provided. I was also disappointed that the braziers didn't act as a source of heat to relieve villagers from the cold of winter.

The functionality of decorations gives an element of strategy and planning to how you decorate your village. You also need to put some planning and thought into who is going to work where. Each villager has different ratings for each of 4 different skills, as well as a set of randomized personality traits. The personality traits are easy to forget about or ignore, but the skills determine how efficiently a worker does their job. Some jobs require a single skill, while others can require a combination of 2 skills to be most effective. This would be a really cool system, if not for the fact that it is completely undercut by other under-developed logistical systems (which I'll talk about later).

Furthermore, different types of military units also have different skill requirements. So when you mobilize villagers for raids, you may have to pull them away from certain jobs, unless you have enough general laborers or builders to pull your vikings from.

Your village must be lit at night, or else villagers will complain.

I would imagine that are quite a few video-game-playing James Bond fans who've been holding their breath for a while in the hopes that IO Interactive would make a 007 game. The pairing seems like a textbook example of the right license being given to the right developer. Honestly, I don't think I've seen a pairing that seemed this ideal on paper since the publisher of Stellaris announced a Star Trek strategy game. Thankfully for James Bond fans, First Light turned out a lot better than the ill-fated Star Trek: Infinite.

IO Interactive's resume primarily consists of the Hitman games, which (despite liking stealth games a lot), I have actually never gotten around to playing. Hitman has been near universally praised for its immersive-sim stealth gameplay, and sprawling, open-ended level design. First Light ended up being my introduction to IO's particular brand of stealth game, and it sure makes an excellent first impression!

Becoming Bond

007: First Light's prologue and tutorial are absolutely top-notch narrative game design. In the prologue chapter, the player is given a disguise while infiltrating a heavily-guarded enemy-occupied outpost. This allows the player to move about somewhat freely while getting used to the basic controls and game systems, while still maintaining a sense of threat and tension.

The first proper chapter is a training montage in which the player will likely screw up their first attempts at tasks.

It then proceeds to put the player in a montage of bootcamp training scenes that serve as quick tutorials for the more intermediate and advanced mechanics and controls. This sequence is one of the best-conceived video game tutorials that I've ever played. It throws the player right into a task with only the bare minimum of guidance. This might initially seem unfair or counter-productive for a tutorial. But since it is framed as a training montage, the game expects the player to barely succeed at the task -- and maybe even fail it outright. And it jumps to the next training scene before you really even have time to worry about the fact that you didn't perform very well -- let alone to try to pause the game and restart at a checkpoint (more on that later). As the montage goes on, however, you'll get other chances to perform these tasks with a bit more knowledge of what to expect and also often with more favorable conditions. As such, each time the player is tasked with performing a specific type of task, you'll probably be more successful at performing it, and will likely perform it more quickly, more skillfully, and more instinctively, which perfectly mirrors Bond's own improvement within the story.

It's quite a clever bit of level design, and this tutorial is a near-perfect marriage of gameplay, narrative, and learning under pressure. Obviously, this sort of tutorial wouldn't necessarily translate to other games. I would assume that in any potential future sequel to First Light, James Bond won't be going through basic training again as part of the story. So unless a potential sequel has the player playing as a new recruit (a 008, perhaps?) before being put in the tux of Bond, this tutorial is likely a one-of-a-kind lightning-in-a-bottle situation. In its context as a prequel/reboot/origin story, this is a damn near perfect introductory couple of hours to both the character and the gameplay.

Near perfect marks, all around! I have basically no notes.

A few weeks ago (or I guess more than a month ago, at this point -- geez I'm slow at writing these), Firaxis released it's "Test of Time" update for Civilization VII. Civ VII players can now finally play as the same civilization throughout the entire game, which addresses one of the player base's biggest criticisms with the game. The internet is now abuzz with the question of whether or not this patch "fixes" or "saves" Civilization VII. From what I've seen so far, it seems to be very well-received, with many internet pundits saying (or implying with their YouTube thumbnails) that Civ VII is "fixed".

Test of Time certainly is a good update. The biggest change is that players now have the choice to play as any civilization in any age, and can choose to play as the same civilization for the entire game, if you choose. To accomplish this, Firaxis gave every civilization an "apex age" in which they are the most powerful. During the apex age, their abilities are the strongest, and they have access to all of their unique units. During non-apex ages, each civ has less powerful versions of their ability, and they are stuck with stock units.

Players can now choose to keep the same civilization when transitioning into a new age.

This approach is similar to Humankind, which also gave players the option to stay as the same culture when progressing to a new era. The big difference is that in Humankind, staying with the same culture would give that culture the same generic bonus every time; whereas in Civ VII, each civ still has a unique ability, it's just a weaker version of their apex unique ability. So Civ VII's approach is a little bit more flavorful in that regard. Basically, Humankind's version of this feature was (as far as I can tell) just a fall-back option if all the good cultures have already been selected by other players. If you don't want any of the available cultures, you can just stay as the same culture, and continue to field their unique units and build their unique infrastructure, and get some small buff. In Civ VII, by contrast, sticking with the same civ is framed as a more assertive decision. You choose that civ because you want their abilities, not simply because you don't want the other civs.

Personally, I still prefer Humankind's method of culture-switching over Civ VII's. I prefer how it is tied to the individual civilization's progress through the eras, and doesn't stop the game at arbitrary points to force everyone to switch. I also like how there's a competitive, first-come-first-serve aspect to switching cultures in Humankind, which lights a fire under the player's butt to make sure to advance fast enough to get a prime pick of the upcoming era's cultures. Humankind's approach feels like a much more organic and natural part of the game that doesn't interrupt the game's pacing at all (but in fact, adds to the pacing). This is in stark contrast to Civ VII's design, which feels forced, arbitrary, and exceedingly "game-ified".

But perhaps a full analysis of Humankind's culture-switching compared to Civ VII should be the subject of another essay, similar to what I did with Civ VII and Ara: History Untold... For now, I want to talk about Civ VII specifically.

In addition to being able to play civs outside of their apex age, Test of Time completely replaces the Legacy paths with new, more granular and more varied "Triumphs". These are smaller goals and milestones that unlock dedication bonuses for the next age. This is intended to add more variety to each age, and make it so that players don't feel like they're following the same rote steps to achieve the same 4 goals every time they play.

Legacy paths were replaced with more varied and granular Triumphs.

Again, this is a good change.

I finally had a few hours to play some VR while the kids were out of the house a few weekends ago. I only had a limited amount of time though, so I decided to go with a short game that I could hopefully finish in a single sitting, instead of trying Aces of Thunder again. I was looking forward to Aces of Thunder (literally counting down the days till its release), but after a couple days of playing it after release, frustrations with the controls and lack of any tutorials put me off of playing it. I decided to put it off to the side in the hopes that it would be updated with a tutorial or more accessibility options.

Not having the time to learn Aces of Thunder, I settled on a game that's been in my back-log for quite a while: the slice-of-life, BAFTA-award-winning indie game Before Your Eyes. This is a novel VR experience that is controlled entirely through eye-motion and blinking. No controller needed! The core conceit is that the game is made up of a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and when you blink your eyes, the game advances to the next vignette. As such, the protagonist's life literally "flashes before your eyes".

Maybe I'll be able to come back to Aces of Thunder next week, when my 4-year-old is with his grandparents visiting my sister out of state?

Life moves quickly, and often feels like a series of "blink-and-you-miss-it" events.

Blink and you miss it

I was expecting a game about witnessing a person's entire life, seeing relationships come and go, children grow up, pets and loved ones growing old and dying, and so forth. It was pitched to me as emphasizing the idea that life happens fast, and that there are moments that feel like you "blink and you miss them". Like one minute I'd witnessing the birth of a child, and 2 blinks later, that child would be going to the first day of school, and then a couple blinks later, graduating high school and going off to college. Before I know it, I'd be seeing the birth of grand children. I'd be left wondering what happened to all the time in between. It would supposedly be about living in the moment and trying to treasure the time you have as you're experiencing it, because that time will be fleeting and gone before you know it. And maybe there would be branching plots based on unconscious decisions such as whether your gaze lingers on certain things, or how long you stay in a particular vignette.

I was expecting something along the lines of a VR version of The Inner Light.

How would life be different if you studied instead of playing video games all day? (Or vice-versa?)

The game is still about these things, to some extent, but it goes in a direction that I totally did not expect. I was expecting a story that is sentimental and maybe nostalgic, and just a general vision of the highs and lows of life in general. What I got instead was something that was a lot more specific and a lot more heartbreaking.