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kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I should just wait to finish it and post in the other thread, but I just made it to Chapter 6 of Conscript, aka "1917: The Game."
One of you (@Lurkerish Kandor) had talked about it on here. I find it really compelling. Conscript is an indie survival horror game (isometric perspective, tasteful pixel art) set in the Battle of Verdun (French perspective, which I appreciate). I've never played a survival horror in my life (although this reminds me a lot of Prey, so I guess the immersive sim wankery is survival horror-adjacent) but I've heard bits and pieces about Resident Evil. It's especially interesting to contrast with Valiant Hearts, which I loved when I played it in high school and vomited up when I tried to replay it now.
What you get is basically Call of Duty: World at War style "war is horror in and of itself." There's a mild nightmare-like surrealness about it, but it's not clownish. It's in smaller things baked into the survival horror gameplay mechanics and stuff like sound and enemy design. You are only ever fighting real, human German soldiers, soldiers that drop things like photos, but it follows classic gamey gamey logic with archetypes. So there's little fast nigga with a shovel, big nigga in armor with an axe, scary fast nigga with a bayonet on his rifle, etc. The sound design is stark and minimalist. You'll get some vaguely sinister drone (sometimes piano music) in the background, and every sound crunches or thuds or reverberates like you're alone in a room. Soldiers stalk around breathing into gas masks like the breathy monsters in horror games, big armor nigga whinnies like a horse when you fell him. There's horrors of war all around you (gas as environmental obstacle, dead and dying soldiers, ruins, etc.), but it's presented tastefully. I remember playing Sniper Elite and rolling my eyes constantly at the overwritten "the enemy you just shot in the bawls had a wife and child" bullshit. This is done a lot more tastefully.
Gameplay wise, it's intentionally jank with weak combat since survival horror doesn't really engage through combat so much as the fear and stress combat puts you in. So you have a mixture of guns (with never enough ammo to feel secure), and a surprising mixture at that that really builds up, and scavangeable melee. There's a minimalist crafting system (fabric for molotov or for bandages, use gunpowder to make low grade ammo or combine to make smaller amounts of higher grade ammo, etc.). You spend a lot of time backtracking, but in the vein of the genre (and Metroidvanias) you're basically untying a knot of how to pick your way through the clusterfuck of a map, opening up more paths until everything is pretty easy to travel between.
This is where I like it a lot more than Valiant Hearts, too. Valiant Hearts wanted to be poignant and a tearjerker but then it set itself in a Tintin comic book world with Prussian zeppelin villains that makes the thing very hokey and self-indulgent. Conscript is explicitly aiming at a narrower range of experience (trench warfare sucks) and everything is tightly wound towards selling that, so much so that it never has to put on the sad iconic piano music. The pixel art is always great, but how much detail it goes into depends on the scene. Inspect an item, or trigger a "cutscene" and it becomes like REALLY high-detail, almost pseudo-photographic pixel art. Animations almost looked rotoscoped how they flow. The aesthetic it shit brown and muddy. Even if the design is gamey and a lot of the combat contrived (you're fighting Germans who forget you if you walk into the next room, Germans that spawn when it would be dramatic (predictable)), the context of what you're doing, how you're making progress, why there's shit in your way always makes sense. There's trench raids so the trench network has been locked off into separate sections and as the sole survivor you have to go root around in the officer's blood-soaked pockets. Things are blocked off because there's barbed wire or gas or rubble in the way. (Again, this reminds me a lot of Prey, which was the video game version of an industrial disaster movie that just happens to have aliens in it.) Your goal is to rescue your brother. Unfortunately, the game felt the need to include multiple endings (another genre convention), in a game with no replay value, and the only good one was locked behind stuff I had no idea to even be looking for until it was way too late. On the other hand, the pacifist run ending is grimly hilarious: you get shot for desertion if you manage to go through the game avoiding killing.
For most of the game I just felt engrossed, not like "whoopee this is fun" or "holy shit I'm pissing myself I'm scared" - though playing it makes me anxious after - but the emotional peak for me has been going over the top. Sometimes there's historical fiction that maybe doesn't move me on its own merits, but it hits such a right note of human misery that it becomes completely miserable. Watching your poilu's pupils dilate and his hands tremble before going over the top, after hours of scurrying around the trenches, is the closest equivalent I've had in video game form to reading the end of Cold Mountain.
One of you (@Lurkerish Kandor) had talked about it on here. I find it really compelling. Conscript is an indie survival horror game (isometric perspective, tasteful pixel art) set in the Battle of Verdun (French perspective, which I appreciate). I've never played a survival horror in my life (although this reminds me a lot of Prey, so I guess the immersive sim wankery is survival horror-adjacent) but I've heard bits and pieces about Resident Evil. It's especially interesting to contrast with Valiant Hearts, which I loved when I played it in high school and vomited up when I tried to replay it now.
What you get is basically Call of Duty: World at War style "war is horror in and of itself." There's a mild nightmare-like surrealness about it, but it's not clownish. It's in smaller things baked into the survival horror gameplay mechanics and stuff like sound and enemy design. You are only ever fighting real, human German soldiers, soldiers that drop things like photos, but it follows classic gamey gamey logic with archetypes. So there's little fast nigga with a shovel, big nigga in armor with an axe, scary fast nigga with a bayonet on his rifle, etc. The sound design is stark and minimalist. You'll get some vaguely sinister drone (sometimes piano music) in the background, and every sound crunches or thuds or reverberates like you're alone in a room. Soldiers stalk around breathing into gas masks like the breathy monsters in horror games, big armor nigga whinnies like a horse when you fell him. There's horrors of war all around you (gas as environmental obstacle, dead and dying soldiers, ruins, etc.), but it's presented tastefully. I remember playing Sniper Elite and rolling my eyes constantly at the overwritten "the enemy you just shot in the bawls had a wife and child" bullshit. This is done a lot more tastefully.
Gameplay wise, it's intentionally jank with weak combat since survival horror doesn't really engage through combat so much as the fear and stress combat puts you in. So you have a mixture of guns (with never enough ammo to feel secure), and a surprising mixture at that that really builds up, and scavangeable melee. There's a minimalist crafting system (fabric for molotov or for bandages, use gunpowder to make low grade ammo or combine to make smaller amounts of higher grade ammo, etc.). You spend a lot of time backtracking, but in the vein of the genre (and Metroidvanias) you're basically untying a knot of how to pick your way through the clusterfuck of a map, opening up more paths until everything is pretty easy to travel between.
This is where I like it a lot more than Valiant Hearts, too. Valiant Hearts wanted to be poignant and a tearjerker but then it set itself in a Tintin comic book world with Prussian zeppelin villains that makes the thing very hokey and self-indulgent. Conscript is explicitly aiming at a narrower range of experience (trench warfare sucks) and everything is tightly wound towards selling that, so much so that it never has to put on the sad iconic piano music. The pixel art is always great, but how much detail it goes into depends on the scene. Inspect an item, or trigger a "cutscene" and it becomes like REALLY high-detail, almost pseudo-photographic pixel art. Animations almost looked rotoscoped how they flow. The aesthetic it shit brown and muddy. Even if the design is gamey and a lot of the combat contrived (you're fighting Germans who forget you if you walk into the next room, Germans that spawn when it would be dramatic (predictable)), the context of what you're doing, how you're making progress, why there's shit in your way always makes sense. There's trench raids so the trench network has been locked off into separate sections and as the sole survivor you have to go root around in the officer's blood-soaked pockets. Things are blocked off because there's barbed wire or gas or rubble in the way. (Again, this reminds me a lot of Prey, which was the video game version of an industrial disaster movie that just happens to have aliens in it.) Your goal is to rescue your brother. Unfortunately, the game felt the need to include multiple endings (another genre convention), in a game with no replay value, and the only good one was locked behind stuff I had no idea to even be looking for until it was way too late. On the other hand, the pacifist run ending is grimly hilarious: you get shot for desertion if you manage to go through the game avoiding killing.
For most of the game I just felt engrossed, not like "whoopee this is fun" or "holy shit I'm pissing myself I'm scared" - though playing it makes me anxious after - but the emotional peak for me has been going over the top. Sometimes there's historical fiction that maybe doesn't move me on its own merits, but it hits such a right note of human misery that it becomes completely miserable. Watching your poilu's pupils dilate and his hands tremble before going over the top, after hours of scurrying around the trenches, is the closest equivalent I've had in video game form to reading the end of Cold Mountain.
