What is this? A relentlessly grim return to Resident Evil, set against the horrors of World War I.
release date July 23, 2024
Expect to be paid £19.99/$19.99
Developer Studio Catchweight
Publisher Team 17
Rated on Radeon 5700 XT, i5-9600K, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer NO
Steam deck Verified
To combine Official page
Once upon a time, survival horror needed monsters. Whether it was a horde of lurching zombies and packs of ugly mutant dogs or a swarm of screaming, flying lizards and, well, uglier mutant dogs, the mood in the genre’s most essential examples was largely defined by these fantastical creatures. Conscript, Jordan Mochi’s top-down return to Resident Evil, doesn’t need to resort to such supernatural threats. The brutality and madness of the longest, most senseless battle of World War I is enough.
The year is 1916, and Andre, a teenager from provincial France, has been trucked to Verdun with his brother Pierre to sacrifice themselves for the good of all on a slowly collapsing front. The prolonged stalemate, in a battle originally intended by the Germans as a meat grinder for the local resistance, has turned into an endless nightmare.
Starving and sleep-deprived, the soldiers take refuge in trenches to escape the constant fire, surrounded by the bodies of their dead comrades. Worse, Andre had promised his diseased mother that he would keep Pierre protected, but his wounded brother was captured during the last German offensive. The quest to rescue him begins a series of trials that bear all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned survival horror, made all the more grim by the fact that nothing our hero witnesses would be out of place in a history book.
Conscript sticks faithfully to the original survival horror formula, with each area (whether the twisting corridors of a ruined French fort or the still-smoldering ruins of a bombed-out village) being a maze of interconnected nodes of carnage dotted with scattered sanctuaries where you can store non-essential items and trade or upgrade your gear. Simple lock puzzles temporarily block progress until you collect the necessary keys or information required to guess the combination code, which grants access to fresh rooms or potentially life-saving shortcuts to previous ones. Everything you need to survive is transformed into a circumscribed resource: ammo, medical supplies, even the ability to save your progress.
I’ve often pondered this familiar dilemma, introduced in a classic Capcom game from almost three decades ago: Is now a good time to employ up one of my remaining ink cartridges, or should I take my chances and keep playing, fearing I’ll run out of ink?
Digging trenches
The combat does make some concessions to newfangled sensibilities, including bonus damage to unsuspecting enemies (I saved dozens of bullets by taking a well-aimed shovel to the back of the head) and a useful dodge that gains valuable invulnerability frames. Still, the deliberate clumsiness and sluggish, stuttering rhythm perfectly capture the attitude of disoriented, scared conscripts reluctantly locked into an endless cycle of violence. Aiming takes ages, leaving you immobile and vulnerable. Mud puddles make it tough to move around the battlefield. Barbed wire fences and clouds of rising phosgene gas will hurt you if you’re haphazard. And don’t even think about trying to reload when an dynamic enemy is charging at you.
These enemies come in all shapes and sizes: there are Germans with rifles and Germans with bayonets; miniature, furious Germans with clubs and hulking, armored Germans with axes; German officers with piercing hats and piercing rapiers; Germans in trenchcoats with flamethrowers. It’s a surprisingly wide range for a game that features only two enemy species (the other being rats, which emerge to feast on rotting corpses in later chapters), and I never felt like the game lacked variety, despite the fact that it took me about 20 hours to complete it.
The game’s creator has clearly studied the era in depth, and it seems that this research has influenced him on a deeper level than just a few design decisions. Mochi’s commitment to historical accuracy generates a layer of authenticity that sets his work apart from more customary approaches to the genre. It also reinforces the relentlessly oppressive tone of Conscript; every aspect of the game feels meticulously crafted to convey the absurdity and corruption of war. The palette, comprised almost entirely of sickly browns and grim grays, offers no hope in this crumbling world, while the backdrops pepper the experience with images of death and decay: corpses piling up, ruined churches, withering orchards. The soundscape is equally unsettling, with straightforward effects of boots on gravel and rusty metal on brittle German skulls suggesting a kind of paranoid isolation. On a more abstract level, the sounds of artillery fire, the screams of the wounded, and the occasional ominous synthesizer sound further distance the player from any sign of humanity.
This unity of purpose, this determination to look unflinchingly at the horrors of war, is evident in every miniature detail of the game, from the inspiring but macabre propaganda posters you find pinned to the walls of public buildings to the peaceful interludes between chapters that movingly contrast Andre’s life on the farm with his current fate. Mochi shows a occasional sympathy for the other side’s unwitting cannon fodder, having them wear personal photos and portraying them as pathetic victims of shell shock, not so different from your stricken allies. The morality at issue here is that imposed by the conditions of war itself, not by any particular camp, and the lines are even more blurred by mechanical touches such as the fact that retreating from battle results in a bullet to the head from your own officer.
There was no sense of triumph when the final battle was won. Even after doing everything I could for my companions, the ending I reached had the air of a ceremony, but no medals were awarded on that somber occasion. If that makes the experience daunting, at least Conscript stays true to its creator’s unique vision. The trappings of classic survival horror are an acquired taste, and you probably already know whether you’re one of those who love them or hate them. But when it comes to pure, despair-inducing darkness, no game in recent years captures the suffering humanity can inflict on itself quite like Conscript.