CONSCRIPT is a harrowing look at the cost of war

Survival horror is seeing a resurgence of late. In the span of a few years we have seen lauded remakes of the Resident Evil series, games like Signalis brought a strange new twist to a classic gameplay loop, and this year’s Crow Country has delivered spooky exploration nightmare that not only taps heavily into nostalgia for the PlayStation era, but brings some new ideas to the table. It could be easy to say that CONSCRIPT from Catchweight Studio is yet another excellent take on the early days of the genre, but the reality is that this nightmare is an entirely different beast.

Set against the backdrop of World War I, CONSCRIPT throws you into the darkened trenches of the Western Front during the battle of Verdun in 1916. You are a runner for the French army. Separated from your brother after the Germans pummel your frontlines with artillery and toxic gas, you need to make your way through the twists and turns of the trenches, stepping over the bodies of your comrades, wading through blood, and shit, and mud, to keep your comrades alive. It is a dark and foreboding task to be navigating through the dark hallways and underground passages. Unlike any other in the genre, CONSCRIPT feels truly claustrophobic, and it’s secret weapon is that while slightly fantastical, this video game manages to capture some of the real world darkness that took place over 100 years ago.

Nearly every classic survival horror deals in fantasy. In Resident Evil there is the evil megacorp Umbrella, which unleashes a zombie-creating virus into the world. Dino Crisis had you facing off against those prehistoric giants in the most ridiculous ways possible. Silent Hill has… I don’t know, triangle freaks or something? (One of my secret shames as a survival horror fan since Resident Evil 2 is that I have never played Silent Hill, please don’t hate me) CONSCRIPT doesn’t deal with fantasy. It deals in harsh realities of survival on the battlefield, and at times, it isn’t pretty.

Instead of faceless zombies you will be chased relentlessly by German soldiers outfitted with raiding clubs, rifles, and bayonets. The close quarters of the trenches means often times you will be duking it out with your own raiding clubs or tench shovels until they break, saving your rifle ammo for when you have a little more room to work with. The combat is slow and clunky. Not in a tank-controls kind of way, but the fact that many weapons need you to reload after a single shot really makes spacing incredibly important. The weapons do pack a punch, and leading a group of enemies in pursuit near a red barrel waiting to explode them all at once with a well-placed shot is a great way to save ammo. However, there is a good chance you’re going to miss and find yourself in a world of trouble. Some might find it frustrating, but as I watch the crosshairs shake, much as I imagine a scared soldier trying to keep it together during the bloodiest experience of their life would be shaking, I find it thematically appropriate.

I am not going to lie, I died far too often in the opening hours as I came to grips with how to avoid being pummeled in the face. Thankfully there is a dodge-roll button that will help to avoid incoming blows, but then you need to keep an stamina if you want to keep the fight alive.

Your best chance at survival is utilizing stealth. As you make your way through the trenches and the various underground bunkers, there will occasionally be an area that you can hide in and avoid the detection of patrolling soldiers. If you manage to pop out behind a soldier and bop them on the head with a fully-charged melee attack, they will go down in one hit. The problem I found is sneaking around feels much harder than it should. I would constantly draw the attention of foes just out of view unintentionally, and we would need to go loud as it were. I am not sure if that is a skill factor, or perhaps just the way that CONSCRIPT wants you to face the darkness of it’s combat.

Then there’s the rats. Their dark little eyes and long tails have haunted me ever since I started this game a few weeks ago. If you leave bodies in the trenches long enough and you pass by, rats will be feasting on their remains, that is, until the spot you. They will immediately launch their attention and start nibbling at your ankles, taking vital health points, and with the potential to cause infection, which limits your max health until you can craft an antiseptic bandage and clear the infection. The rats are BRUTAL. Do not let their size fool you. In fact, they are so brutal that the developer has since rolled out a patch to lessen their impact slightly, but “they’ll still be somewhat annoying because they were designed to be - but you can say goodbye to getting totally one-shotted in half a second and the poisoning chance will be reduced” according to the developer update.

There are two ways you can deal with this problem: throw a grenade into the various rat nests around the trenches which will stop them spawning in the area, but rob you of a much needed explosive, or light those bodies on fire with the limited fuel you will find in bunkers and storage rooms. This means you need to be strategic about where you kill foes, trying to pile the bodies close to one another when you send them to their graves, to make burning them with just one fuel possible. Sometimes you maim an enemy so they writhe in the trenches in pain until eventually succumbing to their wounds. I am ashamed to admit that I always left them suffering as long as possible, rushing my way through those areas so that the rats would not come. CONSCRIPT turned me into a monster.

Those rats will cause you considerable pain because there is a lot of backtracking in CONSCRIPT. The maps are gigantic, with various secrets and hidden items to be found. You will be traipsing from the frontlines to the support trench, from the trenches down to the prisoner camps. Much like the Resident Evil mansion, despite the size and scope of these trenches, you become intimate with the areas as you pass through them multiple times, and having those damn rats blocking your way can result in some deaths that really made you wish that you saved the game at the last safe room you found.

Maybe it is because I just binged the original Resident Evil on the PlayStation during a COVID fever last month, but CONSCRIPT really feels like a love letter to that game in particular. You will be solving simple riddles based on notes found in drawers, and finding that you need the HELMET KEY to unlock certain bunkers. If that is your jam (it certainly is mine), you are absolutely going to love this game.

And the commitment to the staples of the genre, are tremendously impressive. Ammo and health supplies are scarce, your inventory space is small, there’s a shopkeeper who loves to have a chinwag. If you play the game on the default settings, the save mechanic is also limited just like the original Resident Evil games. You will be using fountain pen ink instead of typewriters, but choosing when to save and when to press your luck and save the precious ink for progress further down the road is almost as tense as the combat itself.

But perhaps the aspect of CONSCRIPT that I enjoyed the most was the starkness of it all. It’s dark, it’s gritty, it has moments of quiet, and it then it has moments of abject horror. There aren’t really jump scares waiting in these darkened halls, but every time I ended a play session I lay in bed, starting into the darkness, wondering how the hell I would have dealt with what was going on in those trenches on the Western Front. It’s a powerful experience, and sure, maybe I am just a mark for this given that I have a bit of a fascination with the period, but it is effective and deeper than anything else that I have personally experienced in the genre.

Conclusion

CONSCRIPT is a dark and sombre game that takes the trappings of classic survival horror and pastes them on top a real-world conflict in a surprising and fun way. But I wouldn’t call CONSCRIPT a fun game. I had no fun playing through it’s ten or so hours. Instead I was tense, scared, empathetic, and mesmerised by this intriguing telling of war in a way that I have never seen in any medium before. To have a game that asks you to find the SICKLE KEY to unlock a bunker, but also leaves me awake at 3am wondering how our society even functioned after an entire generation experienced massive PTSD, is quite a powerful game indeed. If you have an interest in the genre, please enlist today.

CONSCRIPT

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Developer: Catchweight Studio / Jordan Mochi
Platforms: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch