Conscript brings survival horror to the trenches of World War I
10.7.2024
By Steven Nguyen Scaife, Contributor
In other games, warfare is about action. You always have targets to shoot and you rarely run low on ammo to shoot them with. Generally certain of where you’re going, you follow prominent icons and unambiguous orders. Many function like a tour of distinct battlefields, designed for globetrotting variety and climactic set pieces in areas you never revisit. They are straightforward us-against-them conflicts, hardly needing a story to thread the missions together.
Conscript leaves an immediate impression because of how little it looks or feels like any of those other war games. It lacks the swooning reverence of something like Battlefield 1, thoroughly demonstrated in that game’s opening sequence, where each death bounces you to a new disposable soldier’s perspective. In Conscript, you play as French soldier André, who awakens among the piled corpses of his fallen comrades, all of them dragged into a mass grave to rot out of sight. It takes hours for you to escape the larger grave of the Verdun trenches to then move on to surrounding forts, ruined towns, and enemy territory, moving heaven and earth in hopes of locating your brother Pierre.
The horror influence comes through most clearly in the sheer amount of the game spent wandering around in the dark. Muddy trench dugouts and stone fort corridors are barely illuminated by electric lights, hastily strung and utilitarian. Wholly unlit pockets and passageways remain, even when the generators are humming along just fine, undamaged by bombardment. The areas are meant to be crept through slowly, with you stopping not only to scrounge for supplies but to listen for the sound of enemy footsteps, or of heavy breathing through a gas mask filter, or of chittering rats that feast on corpses.
To create its atmosphere, Conscript foregoes the typical point-and-shoot first person theater of video game warfare. You see its moldering world from an imprecise overhead perspective that places the jittering target reticule a short ways in front of you; if the target is ever directly above an enemy, they’re much too close for comfort, and they hardly ever go down in one hit. Your initial weapons give you only a single shot, after which you must eject the round and then re-aim before firing again.
The most overt touchstone here is early Resident Evil games: clunky combat, elaborate keys that open locks, and plenty of puzzles. The maps loop back in on themselves, opening up shortcuts to save rooms that include item storage boxes, theme music, and (oddly) a Resident Evil 4-esque merchant who trades weapons and supplies for fistfuls of cigarettes.
Yet unlike its influences, the horrors of Conscript are strictly human. An old trailer for the game shows off what appear to be crawling zombies, suggesting more conspicuously supernatural roots, but the final product features no such thing, not even as a dream sequence. This gritty, grounded quality is what sets Conscript apart from other war-themed horror games. Amnesia: The Bunker features similar mechanics of resource scarcity and heavy darkness, but it revolves around a monster stalking you through holes in the walls. There’s likewise no shortage of fiction that mingles the supernatural with a wartime setting—often World War II in particular—but Conscript achieves its white-knuckle tension almost purely through game mechanics. Human conflict is horrific enough.
As a genre, survival horror is about scarcity and struggle. It is about realizing that you are alone, that you don't have much space to move around, that you lack the tools to defend yourself, or at least the ability to fight back smoothly and confidently. There are more overt horror influences, like a final area that feels like a descent into hell, but Conscript emphasizes the “survival” dimension of survival horror—it's all about scrounging for supplies to populate a limited inventory and then draining those supplies with skirmishes in the dark.
The trench torch, for example, takes up a precious inventory slot. To free up space, you may take your chances by leaving behind a spare battery, or by feeling your way forward with nothing but the light of your immediate surroundings. You need space for any items you might find, but also for keys, medical supplies, or weapons, which require a similar degree of calculation. Can you get by with no extra bullets except what’s in the clip, hoping to find spare ammunition along the way? Or are you headed into such a dangerous area that you need space for another weapon, and possibly another ammunition slot?
Like the best survival horror games, Conscript ensures your every decision carries weight, down to the basic tension of killing an enemy soldier. Sometimes it’s better to try to slip by unnoticed, because corpses attract rats that make for small targets and spread disease, which halves your maximum health until you find treatment. However, depending on where the bodies fall, the rats might be easily evaded. And for bodies lying in the main path, you can burn them—as long as you’re willing to dedicate two more inventory slots for fuel and a lighter.
Conscript’s single most clever depiction of war, though, comes down to its boss battles, or the lack thereof. Most horror games build toward an encounter with some monstrosity meant to decimate your resources, with all of your healing items and ammunition going toward an attempt to chip away at a large health bar. Here, those encounters become battlefield sequences, where you’re sent into the meat grinder in hopes of halting the enemy advance. Each area of the game escalates naturally in tension and difficulty, but where you'd typically find a boss fight in another survival-horror title, you instead find a commanding officer ordering you back into the thick of battle. In this way, Conscript gives a whole new meaning to the horrors of war.
Conscript is available on the Epic Games Store.