Happy about: CONSCRIPT: Director’s Cut

While Conscript has been out for almost two years now, something about it didn’t quite click with me for the longest time. It’s the type of game that is almost hard to believe is what it actually claims to be, because it feels like it shouldn’t work. A classic survival horror game in the setting of the Great War that doesn’t technically have any supernatural elements and works with the top down perspective? How is that going to work, right? But it does. Not without faltering, of course, but Conscript, in its current updated Director’s Cut version, is a genuinely interesting game and fans of the genre shouldn’t ignore it.

I would need to explain how exactly it works, though, because even though I’ve completed the game myself, its existence remains an oddity to my mind. The game plays in top down perspective, with clear division into “rooms”. Most rooms are bigger than just one screen, so they pan alongside your movement, but for the most part it is extremely clear where a “room” ends and you can exit it to a different one. Given the setting, you would expect the game to focus solely on endless labyrinths of trenches, but that is not the case. As you will learn, later chapters of the game feature very open levels with towns and farmlands, that still operate on the same general principle. And in that regard the game is most similar, I suppose, to Blood Omen or A Link to the Past.

Combat comes in two varieties – within melee range or with firearms. And at the start you will be quite aggressively motivated to conserve ammo and stick to melee (or avoid enemies altogether). Later on, depending on your difficulty level and how efficient you are, you might have a fair share of resources to focus more on ranged attacks. There’s a dodge roll, that requires stamina, and you also have a sprint button, but nicely enough, the normal movement speed of the character is brisk enough for stamina to never become a problem for just exploring the locations.

This being survival horror also means puzzle solving and key item hunting, which is usually your main goal in every chapter. You’d need to access some place, but to do so will need to find 4 pieces of some key and for that will need to find more key items and unlock more shortcuts… It’s the aspect that is the most unapologetically “gamey” in Conscript, as the convoluted puzzles get more and more ridiculous as the game goes on. Then again, so do the locations that turn into surreal hellscapes, so perhaps some of it can be attributed to our main character’s declining psyche. Either way, as a fan of exploring, I loved how much stuff was there to see and do and how the game followed the best genre conventions and allows you to re-explore most of the game world up until very late into the game. But I also felt like this is something that will get a bit annoying to some players. Especially during some of the less obvious elements, like one thing that you have to do to get a better ending, that seems completely unprompted and nonsensical…

Mood-wise, you probably can guess what to expect. Set during Battle of Verdun, still considered to be one of the bloodiest and also most pointless battles in recent human history, most of the time things are extremely bleak. The conditions are terrible, people are going mad, both enemies and friendlies don’t always die quickly and convulse first. After bashing an enemy’s skull in with a shovel and looting their corpse, you may find a photo they had on themselves, of their friends, family or relatives. The world itself is burnt and ruined, dead animal carcasses piling in the gassed farmhouses. Mass graves, as everyone has long since ran out of coffins. It’s quite oppressive, unsurprisingly, and whatever ending you get (and there are several), you can expect that no character escapes these horrors without deep psychological trauma. The game uses the really interesting, late-90s pre-rendered style to make it all work. And the soundtrack is haunting as well.

The big issue, in my opinion, is that the game drags on a bit longer than it needed to. The final section in particular feels extremely long and because it also mostly does the things you’ve seen the game do before, it stops being surprising. You know exactly when the game will spawn a surprise ambush, because it will do it the same way every time. You start predicting every trick and the gameplay becomes routine. Especially since it’s also so combat heavy at the end.

But other than that, I think Conscript does a lot of things really well. It genuinely nails the genre, despite also being a game with lots of alive characters you talk to and several areas that are temporarily (or permanently) without enemies. It has a lot of smart customizability – I played on normal and with no limit on saves, because I rarely find “ink ribbons” not pointless. And I could do so, and could make things even easier or even harder if I wanted to. CONSCRIPT: Director’s Cut is a genuinely good fresh take on the genre and while it is quite heavy in terms of the subject matter, it is absolutely worth playing.