There are plenty of games about the horrors of war. Spec Ops: The Line famously forces you into morally unthinkable positions as a soldier. This War of Mine throws you in the shoes of a civilian trying to survive in a city under siege. Few games have ever used the lens of the survival horror genre to take a look at the topic, but this is the approach taken by Conscript, from Jordan Mochi and Catchweight Studio.
Conscript casts you as a French soldier looking for his brother during the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Rather than playing like a modern war game like Call of Duty, the game instead is a top-down retro graphics survival horror game that treats the trenches like the Spencer Mansion. Unlike last year’s Amnesia: The Bunker, which was also about a French soldier in World War I, there’s no supernatural element in Conscript. There’s no monster stalking you, just enemy combatants that are similarly armed as you. Despite how this might seem like a mismatch of gameplay and theme, it all comes together in a wonderful way, as long as you can stick through the challenge.
There were definitely moments throughout that pushed me difficulty wise. Being a survival horror game, resource management is crucial. When the game starts, your unit’s ranks have been thinned by the encroaching German troops, and your supplies are scarce. You’ll have to not only keep track of your bullets, but your health supplies and your melee weapons, which will be rendered useless after a certain amount of hits. There were moments where I thought I was going to have to roll back to a previous save, as I was running desperately low on everything, but persisting a little bit more got me to a place where I could recover and proceed. It’s a classic survival horror feeling, and Conscript isn’t afraid of pushing you to show you how dire war truly is.
In combat, you’ll need to stand in place while aiming your weapon. The longer you aim, the tighter the reticle will get, making for some tense moments before you pull the trigger. Certain weapons also require you to not just reload the clips, but also cock the gun between shots, making for very frantic moments during firefights. Melee weapons have similar aiming, but feel even more desperate. To alleviate that, you have a dodge roll that uses stamina. Running will also drain your stamina, so moving around in battle needs to be monitored, or else you’ll be left vulnerable. I don’t love the stamina system, particularly because it still drains when running outside of combat, making navigation a weird alternation between sprinting and walking.
Since there’s no supernatural element to the game, the enemies you encounter are generally various types of German infantry. You might think that this could get repetitive, but there’s an interesting variety presented, giving you a mix of ranged and melee. Each class of enemy is easy to tell apart from the others, allowing you to get a quick read of the battlefield for prioritizing targets, which is hugely important. You might be able to rely on a pistol for the weaker rifle guys, but when you see the heavily armored dude with the ax running at you, you know it’s shotgun time. I think some of the more durable enemies take a bit too much damage to take down, as it feels like this game works best when the violence is sharp and brutal, but overall they do a good job of mixing things up appropriately.
The one exception for me is the rats, which I think are almost always irritating and punishing. They usually show up in packs of three or four, and are incredibly hard to hit, in part because of the game’s slightly unreliable melee combat. In addition, they also have a chance of poisoning you, which reduces your max health until you’re able to use a disinfectant item. Early in the game this was a cause of much frustration. There were at least a couple times where I had been exploring and solving puzzles for about 15 to 20 minutes and went back to a save room, only to get poisoned by a rat right at the door.
If you’re looking to save some ammo, there is a rudimentary stealth system in the game. For the most part, it works on a gameplay level, but it does break immersion for me in some ways. Enemies are pretty simple, and only will spot you if they can see you. This means you’re okay to fire off a gun or explosive near them without fear of them taking notice, which is a bit strange to me. I ran into times where there were two guys standing next to each other facing the same direction, and I was able to stealth kill them both without alerting them. That being said, it is really great when you spot a couple guys patrolling your trench and are able to catch them apart enough to take them each out in one swift melee strike without it becoming a big firefight.
While most of the combat takes place during exploration, every once in a while Conscript will throw you into a full-on battle on the frontlines, and it’s harrowing. This is not a triumphant power fantasy of your squad pushing back enemy forces. It’s a brutal slog as you frantically try to fend off opposing soldiers as your compatriots drop like flies around you. Bodies lie face down in the mud. Allies crawl along the ground with legs missing. Bullets and artillery fire fly through the air overhead. For a game that takes visual style from an older generation, it’s amazing how visceral it all feels, particularly because of the game’s excellent sound design.
For me, the real test of an old-school survival horror game is its level design. How do areas slowly expand as you solve puzzles and locate keys? What are you learning about the world as you explore? Conscript has a few different large areas to explore, ranging from tight trenches to an abandoned town, and they all feel interesting, for the most part. You won’t necessarily be learning a lot of the lore and backstory from the environment, like you would in a Resident Evil, there are definitely small little stories that you find throughout that add to the tone.
Where the level design struggles for me is the layout with regard to backtracking. Save rooms feel a bit too far apart, in ways that forced me to double back a lot when I was making progress. Places like the Spencer Mansion work really well because they easily loop back on themselves as you unlock more passages, and Conscript’s areas sometimes feel a bit too expansive to get around efficiently, and oftentimes keys would unlock new areas that made the map even more sprawling rather than hooking back to previous areas, exacerbating the issue. The distance between save rooms does ratchet up the tension of exploration, but there were times that I lost about 15 minutes of progress, which felt frustrating instead of fun. It’s a tricky balance to strike, because the game clearly wants to present a more challenging experience to the player, but it’s easy for that to devolve into frustration.
Fortunately, the in-game map is very effective, making unopened doors with the keys needed in order to progress. It’s a great feeling to open your map and start planning your route after finding a key you’ve been looking for forever. The map will also mark puzzles that you need to solve with little icons, so it’s rare that you’ll be lost as to where you need to go. None of the puzzles require too much heavy lifting, but some of them are clever enough to feel satisfying. There are a couple combination locks that require some thought and tie into the stories of the people affected by the war, but most of them involve just finding items to clear a pathway.
As you explore, you’ll find cigarettes all over, which act as the game’s currency. In a very Resident Evil 4 fashion, you’ll have a merchant that shows up in your save rooms that can provide you with supplies and upgrades. These end up feeling very meaningful, making collecting the gems that can be sold for large values a very rewarding experience. Upgrades like additional inventory slots and extra max health are crucial to your survival, giving you a nice power curve to help make this oppressive experience feel more manageable.
The sights and sounds of the game help build on that oppressive feeling, though it’s not without its faults. Audio effects really crank up the intensity of a fight, with scary sounding gunshots and strained grunts. There’s a light musical score, including a really great save room tune, that layers on the atmosphere. Where the presentation falters a bit is the visuals of the game. I like the low-poly pixelated look it has to its character models, but the muddy nature of the graphics combined with the color palette of the setting can make it tough to navigate. There were several times that I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at or where I could pass through a space. I often found myself checking the map to find a door at the edge of an area because the opening was tough for me to see because of the visual style.
As I mentioned before, the story of the game is about you trying to locate your brother on the battlefields of Verdun. It’s nothing special, but it’s a very simple and relatable goal to keep you driving forward. Most of the present day plot involves you talking to various people who say they haven’t seen him while deploying you to different areas that need help. Between chapters, you get flashbacks to your life at home before the war, which do help flesh out the principle characters and give you a brief reprieve from the bleakness, but it’s largely backgrounded. The story moments that worked most for me were the micro stories it told as you explored. I’ll always remember the little gut punch I felt when I went to loot the body of an attacking soldier I killed, and the item I found on him was a family photograph.
In video games, there are a lot of different hells, and Conscript goes to great lengths to show why war earns its place as one of the worst hells of all. Every aspect of the game, from visuals to audio to level layout, is meant to emphasize the grueling nature of World War I, making for an experience that might not be for everyone. There are some difficulty options you can select at the start, allowing you to change some of the more old school design choices related to saving, which can help ease frustration you might have with the game. Even with that, many of the areas feel a bit too sprawling without enough shortcuts, making getting around an often tedious experience. Conscript is well-done survival horror, but you should know going in that it’s tonally bleak and purposefully challenging, making it feel like a death march even at the best of times.
Code provided by publisher. Conscript is out now on PC via Steam.
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