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Conscript review: sturdily crafted and gruelling WW1 survival horrorDo green herbs work for trench foot?
Do green herbs work for trench foot?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Take me back to the soft blue light,Conscript. It’s safe there, in the save room. No body-armoured heavies with trench raiding clubs. No tunnels choked with sickly, mushy-pea green gas. No rats feasting on my ankles, occasionally inflicting a disease that halves my health bar. “Christ, they’re sending runners now?” the rifleman asks as I hoof south from Fort Souville after a gruelling trench defence whittles down my resources to a busted fightin’ spade and a handful of pistol bullets.
“Are we fucked?”
What a keen misery is it to realise it’s me rushing for aid - not the rotting horse corpses or the shell-shocked shaking in silent corners - that tips him off to encroaching disaster. I suppose spending so long in hell means gradual adjustments in temperature don’t really register.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Not quite threadless, granted. You’ll find maps - good ones at that - marking not just locked doors but specifics. Notes tell you which keys for which doors, or where certain puzzles you’ll want to return to are. But disorientation and danger still arise from dense, claustrophic interiors and how regularly areas repopulate with enemies after progression points. Here’s a minor heresy for purists: you can’t really avoid the vast majority of combat encounters here. You can sometimes, slipping into designated spots to wait out a passing patrol. Most of the time, though, you’re going to be glad you kept a designated inventory slot for spare bullets.
I fought off said patrols with a controller. Left trigger to aim, right to fire, with crosshairs that focus the longer you steady your shot. Pistols are relatively weak but offer the advantage of not having to chamber every shot like the more effective rifle, and these minor points of interruption feel both authentic and pant-pissingly tense in the middle of a fight. We’re not made of bullets though, soldier, so you’d better get acquainted with the ancient and noble art of swinging a spade at a man’s skull.
Melee works similarly to guns, aim and swing, with a few odd quirks. Stagger feels very inconsistent in Conscript, although I found I could mostly reliably cancel an opponent’s melee attack if I swung at the very top of their swing’s pullback. Also, have fun cracking barrels. Your melee weapons don’t degrade hitting inanimate objects, which is nice, but also you have to wait until the crosshair focuses to reliably hit a barrel you’re standing right next to. I know, I know. Small potatoes. There’s a war on, etc. Those stagger inconsistencies were a bit of a sticking point for me, though. I suppose there has to be a semi-random element since you can’t aim at certain parts with the isometric viewpoint, but when resource usage and combat spacing are so vital, it feels worse to be cheated out of breathing room than it feels triumphant to be gifted it. Still, the dodge roll is an incredibly useful tool for making space, if you’ve got the stamina for it.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Elsewhere, though, Conscript makes this stuff work for it. You’ll be called to the frontline at intervals. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a turret section feel less like a power fantasy. The crosshair shakes and shudders violently. German soldiers pile in groups of two, three, until every tool at your disposal is spent - then they pile in some more. A twist onResident Evil1 Remake’s crimson heads soon sees rats infest crucial routes until you put a stop to the source. The setting offers up enough hazards so that unlocking new areas with gas masks and dynamite feel like the actions of a resourceful, desperate soldier, as does crafting makeshift molotovs and medical supplies.
Again, though, it’s that underpinning machinery of map design, lock-and-key progression, and exploration flow that dams up an unbelievably bleak tale from ever draining into dreariness. Conscript is frequently stop-and-stare arresting in its implementation of jaundiced light and grim colour, its many creative uses of a palette largely limited to blood, rot, shit, and shell casings. But while Resi has camp,Signalisromance, andSilent Hillbaroque profundity, Conscript has little to fall back on, save the grim promise of either the meat grinder or the deserter’s bullet. That is not an easy setup to make appealing and to inspire pushing on, but the game manages it. In much horror, hell is a place we descend to through decreasingly mundane thresholds. Here, it’s where we start.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
It can be tricky to assess the balance in a genre that relies on making you feel hopeless, threatened and, yes, a little bit tilted occasionally. Resources feel plentiful, initially, and so I feasted until famine struck and I had to abandon my first run, which honestly just made me respect Conscript more for committing to it. If this isn’t your bag, there’s four difficulty settings, plus options to enable checkpoints and unlimited saves - in saferooms still, but without needing to use an ink consumable. Also included are mainstays like playthrough ranks and unlockable costumes. And - ohoho! - an honest-to-god digital manual, complete with a blank notes page. Love it. The way I just structured that paragraph now necessitates I make it clear I’m not just saying this because of the manual, but: Conscript is good survival horror. Fill your boots. Check for rats first though, innit.
