More often than not, the survival horror genre depicts otherworldly creatures that make the hairs on your neck stand on end. Some do it better than others, but deg the perfect, alien creature to go bump in the night is an enormous part of the brief. Conscript is unique in that it presents its chilling brand of horror through the lens of World War I, where the monster isn’t some contorted, pulpy mass of eyes and limbs, it’s man. The first-hand, personal violence of conflict is illustrated so deftly in Conflict, as are the consequences of war, both direct and indirect, in a far more grounded, gut-churning manner than we’re used to.
What’s scary here isn’t the unknown terrors lurking around dark corners, it’s the mortal scar that man can cause in the name of God and country.
Staging a survival horror game in the midst of the Battle of Verdun is novel in its own right, the tale of two brothers at the heart of it maintains a personal, relatable thread throughout what is an otherwise confronting video game that’s a matter of fact show and tell of a battle that claimed more than 300,000 lives. As André, you scour no man’s land itself in search of your brother Pierre, who’s been missing in action prior to the game’s start. You thrust yourself through hell on the hope of reuniting and keeping your family intact, and the dreamlike vignettes where you experience André’s pre-war life at the family’s French cottage are surprisingly nuanced, their quiet is juxtaposed by the thunderous bombardment that’s frequent throughout the remainder of Conscript.
The game is formulaic as far as survival horror design goes, and remains true to the blueprints trademarked by those who’ve come before. It might not be Spencer Mansion, but Conscript’s trenches, forts, and devastated battlefields form such a memorable, multi-faceted map that reveals more of itself as you progress. It’s a big game, but Conscript’s in-game map is so easily readable I never had an issue in finding a path through the chaos. I wish the same could be said for your objectives which seem to reveal themselves through the commands of your superior officers, but are never noted within the handful of menus you have. From a UX experience, this could have been remedied, and justified narratively, through small diary entries by André as he attempts to quantify the horrors he’s seen.
Mechanically, it definitely leans classic with a control scheme that’s kind of outdated but exists in service of tension, so I respect it. The movement feels fine, you’re even capable of short jogs and tactical rolls if your stamina permits, it’s the “stop and prop” shooting that left me a little offside at times. To reiterate, I do like the sense of urgency and fear of having to stop and aim carefully before firing, but it’s a constant frustration trying to thumb a full serving of rounds into these century-old firearms which gives the enemy ample time to close the gap. The fear is only heightened courtesy of an erratic crosshair which becomes harder to focus if you’re right in the pressure cooker, and it also speaks to the reality that the French conscripted young men who were far from marksmen. I think that instinct to survive translates to Conscript’s gameplay, regardless of the issues I do have with the weapon reloading, and there’s a brutality that’s extremely evident when you’re rearranging the features of a soldier’s face with a trench shovel.
In of surviving the trench warfare, the biggest issue I faced was the bloody rats. They’re an interesting mechanic in their own right, however, as they’re a direct consequence of death in this war. Until you’re able to collapse their small tunnels, they’ll enjoy the body buffet left behind and happily nip at your heels which is so frustrating.
While things can get a little abstract in these classic survival horror titles, Conscript’s puzzles felt relatively to the point and kept progression well on track. I’d routinely find a key or tool needed to access the next part of the map, and it never got more complicated than realising that the fire extinguisher you’d found was needed to put out the flames raging in front of the one door leading to the front. However, the need for juggling so many key items does highlight the pain of inventory management that’s prevalent here. For all of the ammo you need to carry to get bang for buck from this low capacity, turn of the century weapons, I wish there could have been a second inventory for quest items to lessen the need for frequent visits to the storage trunks scattered in the game’s handful of locations.
As stated, I do think the game’s maps, and specifically the environments, are well done. While the bunkers and their dingy lighting are the most claustrophobic and scary parts of Conscript, there’s something profoundly upsetting about the scenes from the overworld. So many buildings reduced to cinders, bands of horses left dead in roadways, and bodies piled up or tossed nonchalantly into creeks. I feel like Conscript is the first game since Spec Ops: The Line that really depicts war as it really is, free from the glamour and “glory” it’s often dressed with. The game’s lo-fi visuals, as well as the brief fully-rendered vignettes that punctuate certain story beats, call to mind a point during the nineties where Conscript’s fidelity would be cutting edge. Thankfully, coupling pixel art with so many poorly lit scenes never compromised the readability of the action, opposition soldiers scrambling toward you were instantly recognisable and collectible items would glint as if to cry out.
Having seen Conscript on expo floors a smattering of times in the last few years, the game is still a huge surprise for me. It makes such an inspired decision in setting that everything else is icing on the cake, and even the stuff I don’t adore still feels in service of what the developer is aiming to achieve in ratcheting the tension up several notches to create one of the most suffocating video games about war I’ve ever played.
