Video Game / CONSCRIPT

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CONSCRIPT is a top-down Survival Horror developed mostly by Jordan Mochi of Catchweight Studio and published by Team17 in 2024 after a few years of development following a successful crowdfunding campaign. The game stands out in the Survival Horror genre - which usually features inhuman monster opponents and/or supernatural elements - by its commitment towards Realism-Induced Horror with its portrayal of one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.The game itself puts the player in the boots of André Hiver, who alongside his brother Pierre was conscripted onto the French Army for the Battle of Verdun. After an attempt to defend Fort Souville goes wrong to the point of leaving him the Sole Survivor of his regiment, André would concern himself to find his brother as well as surviving the war.

CONSCRIPT contains examples of:

• A.K.A.-47: Most of the weapons are under generic or fictionalized names with the exceptions of the Ruby and Luger pistols. The Spandou machine gun is a downplayed example, as it was a popular nickname for the MG 08/15 machine gun which the in-game weapon is based on.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: There are a handful of costumes that can be unlocked after beating the game. One can be unlocked any way the game is complete, one is unlocked after beating the Veteran difficulty, another one is unlocked by getting a S rank while beating the aforementioned difficulty, and another one is obtained after getting the Golden Ending.
• Back Stab: Hitting an unaware enemy with a fully-charged melee swing (either by being behind an enemy or by hiding around a corner) is capable of killing most unarmored enemies in a single hit, incentivizing stealth in order to conserve your limited ammunition and avoid deadly encounters. 
• Badass Cape: One of the German types wear this and come armed with a sword they can deal huge damage with. They can however be taken down with a single sufficiently strong armor piercing weapon however.
• Bayonet Ya: Chapter 5 introduces German riflemen with bayonets.
• Boring, but Practical: The Trench Shovel is this among the melee weapons available. While its damage isn't impressive, it's a fairly common melee weapon with good durability making it a reliable choice for most of the game.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Getting an S+ rank - which involves a clean new save, saving as rarely as possible and healing as rarely as possible, as well as beating it as fast as possible - will net you a Golden Spandau with infinite ammo.
• Breakable Weapons: All of the melee weapons with the exception of the Knife have limited durability, though they can be restored by repair kits.
• Broken Bridge: Some paths tend to be blocked off by debris. André is able to remove the debris with artillery cannons, as long as he can find the shells to fire with.
• Bookends:
  • "They're back..." André's first words are also his last in the Shellshock ending.
  • In the Golden Ending, André's son is conscripted to fight in World War II, complete with a French soldier at a military truck asking him "Ready to go, son?"
• Body Armor as Hit Points: When worn, the Body Armor can completely absorb melee damage onto itself.
• Booze-Based Buff: Drinking alcohol will increase André's tolerance for pain and also makes his usually shaky aiming much more stable for a while.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Introduced in Chapter 4, the flame-thrower wielding German soldiers may be the closest this game ever has for a boss. They have the highest armor level among enemy types and while their weapon doesn't have that big of range, their fire can pierce through walls, which combined with them being encountered in confined spaces makes them a particularly tricky foe to deal with.
• Conscription: It's in the title, and one of the Flashbacks involves André getting drafted onto the war. Same happens to André's son in the Golden Ending.
• The Dead Have Names: A German casualty report with names, ranks and jobs can be found within a medical tent in Chapter 5.
• Deadly Gas: As expected from the setting, gas attacks are a serious hazard. The opening battle of the game forces André to flee from a gas bombardment back into the Support Trench, and several areas are blocked off by gas clouds until a gas mask can be found in Chapter 2.
• Digitized Sprites: The game employed sprites pre-rendered out of 3D models, which combined with the Retraux resolution gives the game a look reminiscent of some Game Boy Advance titles.
• Distant Finale: The "Conscripted" ending jumps to 1940, revealing the fates of the main cast in the aftermath of the game's events.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: André cannot move while aiming or even charging his melee attacks. The rifle-toting German soldiers are very much subject to the same restriction, which combined with how long they take to aim actually makes it feasible to take them down with melee means as long as they aren't assisted with fellow melee soldiers (nor whenever the riflemen in question don't happen to be armed with bayonets which they are much fond in using of).
• Down the Drain: André will have to traverse through the sewers in Chapter 5, under a ruined city.
• Elite Mooks: The Heavy Armor wearing, hatchet-wielding Knights, who appear as early as Chapter 1 and are able to withstand a few rifle and even shotgun rounds.
• Emergency Weapon: The knife, which does have faster attack speed, infinite durability, does not drain stamina on use and can backstab non-armored Germans in a single hit as long as it's charged. With its otherwise low base damage however it is next to useless in direct combat with the Germans.
• Equipment Upgrade: As long as he gathers gun parts, André is able to upgrade the firepower, reload speed, fire rate and magazine capacity of his firearms through The Merchant (with a limit being based on Chapter progression to prevent the weapons from becoming overly powerful early on in the campaign).
• Exploding Barrels: These exist, and there's an achievement for blowing up at least four Germans utilizing these.
• Expressive Health Bar: Lower health will darken André's portrait in the inventory screen, with critical status borderline giving him black-ish eyes.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Gas Mask Mooks tend to have their pitch altered by their apparatus, making them sound especially monstrous. The Knights in particular tend to make horse-like sounds whenever they'd die.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: Structural damage and especially the mustard gas do creep up unto the underground areas. Chapter 5 in particular concludes with André getting his exit blocked out (and his gas mask failing) after getting the key to Fort Vaux inside the Church's basement, barely being able to be rescued by the medic.
• Fatal Family Photo: Occasionally found when looting dead bodies. André also clutches his family photo in his last moments during the Trapped and Coward endings.
• Flashback: These are interspersed in between chapters, chronicling moments of André's life before getting drafted. It is worth exploring within these sections, particularly as Pierre's drawings within the flashbacks can provide clues towards the - randomized per playthrough - code for the locker that contains the father's watch needed for the Golden Ending.
• Gas Mask Mook: Most of the German soldier types encountered in the game are this, with only basic Riflemen and Shovel users being the exception.
• Ghost Town: Chapter 5 has André stumble upon a city that is completely bereft of people aside of the German soldiers coming in. And the Merchant showing up at Save Points. And Gaston.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: The game has a bit of this as getting the best ending(s) requires the player to never skip a single major chapter-climaxing battle.
• Hand Cannon: The Hand Cannon is a secret item found in Fort Souville, available after acquiring the Fire Extinguisher, which boasts the highest base damage of any firearm in the game. It is a four-barreled, high-caliber pistol that functions similarly to the game's semiautomatic pistols, but is balanced by lengthy reload times, a small magazine size, and a unique ammo type scattered in small amounts across the game, usually in secret or optional areas.
• Heart Container: Morphine extends André's health bar by a single block upon use. There are also Stimulants that extend his Sprint Meter by the same.
• Here We Go Again!: The "Conscripted" ending culminates in André's son being sent off to fight in World War II.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Your melee attacks have a bit more range than they look (and more range than how near the melee enemies would attack you within), which at least does make backstabbing possible.
• Hope Spot: During Chapter 2 André is tasked with releasing a pigeon that will deliver a message to Fort St. Michel, and this would require him to find a key to the coop. By the time André reaches the coop with the key, the pigeons are dead. André's able to get a lockpick out of the coop, but with no live birds, he'll have to deliver an urgent message to Fort St. Michel by himself, on foot.
• Identical Grandson: During the Flash Forward of the Golden Ending, André's son has a completely identical spriteset that his father used in his flashbacks.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The difficulties are based after ranks, with them being Training->Recruit->Soldier->Veteran.
• Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: Befitting a game set in World War I, the "New Game" option in the menu instead reads "Enlist".
• Indy Escape: André has to run and take cover from a boulder twice.
• Instant Messenger Pigeon: If André gets to release the pigeon at Fort Vaux before the final battle in Chapter 6, the French reinforcements will be there by the time André is about to reach the outer perimeter, with the French general even providing André with a grenade launcher in a middle of the battle.
• Interface Screw: Equipping the Gas Mask gives the screen a vignette effect, simulating vision being reduced by the mask.
• It's Up to You: Within the Hold the Line sections of the game, the fellow French soldiers that we do see in action tend to drop like flies anyway, leaving it up to André to defend the encampments (assuming he wouldn't end up chickening out himself).
• Knockout Ambush: Chapter 1 concludes this way, with André on his way back from Fort Souville through a barely lit bunker only to be knocked out with a club by a gas-masked German from the darkness. André will later suffer another ambush of that kind only to be saved by a fellow French soldier just in time.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": At one point in Chapter 3 André has to cross through a minefield in order to obtain a Fire Extinguisher to put out the fire in Fort St. Michel. He does find a map with a safe path that is drawn from a different angle than the game's view.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: At the end of the game, Pierre's leg has been infected, and his only hope of survival is for his leg to be amputated.
• Lock and Key Puzzle: This Survival Horror staple is very much present, with plenty of places within Fort Souville being locked with emblem keys, some of which André is only able to find when on his way back from Fort St. Michel.
• Loyalty Mission: A minor one. Starting in Chapter 2 Gaston, an American soldier within the French ranks, can be encountered once per Chapter (twice in Chapter 2), asking for a single cigarette each time. If André gives him a cig each time he meets up with Gaston, including within Fort Vaux where he's dying, Gaston will then let André have his Mustang handgun.
  • There's also a medic that will ask André to bring a different healing item each time he's encountered.
• MacGuffin: The Pocket Watch that belonged to André's and Pierre's father. It is a necessary item for one of the four endings.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Long exposure to poisonous gas or getting bitten by a rat will give André the poison status, which will decrease his health and sprint meters (and dangerously, this effect can potentially stack) and requires either a disinfected bandage or a first aid kit to cure.
• Molotov Cocktail: Can be crafted by combining fabric with alcohol.
• Mooks, but No Bosses: André may have to deal with a massive skirmish of a German army involving a pair of flame thrower troopers but he never faces a German tank. The Germans don't start mass producing these vehicles until the final year of the war anyway.
• Mouse Hole: Well, rat burrows. Some locations contain these, and André can use up a grenade to blow up these burrows in order to prevent the rats from spawning in the area.
• Multiple Endings: There are four endings differing in André and Pierre's ultimate fates, each one influenced by certain decisions made throughout the game.
  • Trapped: Fleeing back to Pierre before the final fight, André is either unable to find Pierre or is forced to Mercy Kill him with a pistol. Before he can escape, Fort Vaux collapses from the fighting, either killing André or leaving him trapped in the underworks to an Uncertain Doom.
  • Coward: André manages to carry Pierre out of Fort Vaux and back to friendly lines. Pierre either lives or dies depending on if André released the pigeons, but André passes out from exhaustion shortly after getting Pierre to a medical tent. Several days later, André is judged for cowardice for choosing to hide instead of fighting during the end-of-chapter battle sequences, and is executed by firing squad.
  • Shellshock: André fights in all the end-of-chapter battles and it plays the same as the Coward ending until André passes out. A Time Skip jumps to an interactive sequence where André is at a hospital, now a thoroughly traumatized Shell-Shocked Veteran as he hallucinates escaping from the hospital, being attacked by a monstrous gorilla in a German uniform^note Straight out of the Destroy This Mad Brute! poster, and waking up at the barracks from the beginning of the game, implying that André is endlessly reliving the events of the game within his mind.
  • Conscripted: An extended version of the Shellshock ending unlocked by releasing the pigeons and getting the family pocket watch in the final chapter, adding a Playable Epilogue revealing the fates of André and Pierre after the war's end. They managed to survive though their relationship with each other is strained. Both raised families but Pierre's son died at just four years old, and Pierre later dies in 1933 at a family dinner due to lung damage from poison gas. André lives to see the start of the second World War, and the final moments reveal that the player character during the epilogue has been André's son. The date is May 5th, 1940, and there's a military truck waiting outside, with a soldier asking him "Ready to go, son?"
• Nerf: Rats were extremely dangerous in the initial release. Between their extremely aggressive AI and high chance at causing infections with every bite they could kill a player in a matter of seconds and make certain sections nearly unplayable if they happened to appear at a body positioned by a door. The first update to the game rebalanced them so they were less aggressive, had a cooldown on how often they could deal damage, and added more means of dealing with them.
• New Game Plus: After beating the game the player can make a clear save, loading which will start this game mode. Keep in mind that aiming for the elusive S+ rank would require starting from a clean new game.
• No Antagonist: While André fights his way through plenty of enemy soldiers, there is no Big Bad or individual antagonistic force involved in the plot at all and his entire motivation is finding his brother and bringing him home alive.
• No Name Given: André never learns The Merchant's name.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In Chapter 3 André can encounter a German prisoner that asks him to find a photograph of his wife under the bridge. After doing the deed he'll reward André with 30 cigarettes. In the next chapter André will end up fighting an axe-wielding Knight and loot that same photograph out of him, raising some implications.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Invoked. There are no supernatural elements or zombies or monsters to be found here. The only enemies in Conscript are hungry rats and angry, desperate young men no different from André beyond their uniform. The more zealous and well-trained and -equipped enemies have a more inhuman aspect to them but they are in fact just human beings and may still drop photos of loved ones when killed.
• One-Hit Polykill: There's a purchasable elephant rifle that can pierce through multiple enemies in a single shot.
• Pacifist Run: There is a "Conscientious Objector" achievement if André can pull this off, as even the major battles are skippable. Suffice to say André will not be going out of the war alive with this approach.
• Pre-Rendered Graphics: The game runs on YoYo Games' GameMaker Studio commonly associated with 2D games, and most of the game's assets were pre-rendered out of 3D models.
• Punch-Packing Pistol: The revolver has stronger damage value while using pistol rounds and has the strongest potential damage potential to be upgraded into out of all handguns. Its downside is that it isn't semi-automatic, and therefore has to be cocked in-between shots much like with the Rifle and the Pump Action Shotgun.
• Respawning Enemies: The Fort Souville's trenches are constantly under siege with Germans coming through missing wire fencing. André is able to repair the fencing with Wire spools to reduce the enemy waves. Rats will also continuously pop up as long as are there any fresh corpses or open burrows.
• Sad Battle Music: Midway through the final battle at Fort Vaux's outer perimeter, the already minor battle music will get replaced by Pierre's piano song.
• Save-Game Limits: By default, the player can only save his progress at blue lamps, and requires a consumable Ink to do so. The Save Token aspect is optional, as is the involvement of Check Points (disabled by default).
• Save Point: André saves his progress at blue lamp thingies, and a magical item chest is usually nearby. In Chapter 4 that involves André coming back to the Fort Souville's support trenches after delivering a message to the regiment at Fort St. Michel, the Germans would have in the meantime ransacked the bunkers and destroyed the equipment, including the lamps and item boxes, leaving André with fewer Save Points than before.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Can be found at a Hunting Cabin in Chapter 3, and it boasts a higher base and max damage to the pump action shotgun while having lesser capacity. Just beware of the German ambush after you'd leave the cabin with the Shotgun.
• Scare Chord: One of these plays when spotted by an enemy, or during some enemy ambushes.
• Scenery Gorn: There are plenty of locales André crosses through that look appropriately grimey, which can include parts of the Trenches with some damage, an Abandoned City etc. The most significant example of this may be the underground layers of Fort Vaux, which look so rusty and outright hellish that these could as well be mistaken for Silent Hill's Dark World locations.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: André actually has an option to flee major battles like the ones in Chapter 1, 2, 4 and the final battle. Skipping any of them is a sure way to get André in front of a firing squad for desertion.
• Shot at Dawn: A locked area in the Support Trench is dedicated to executions by firing squad for cowardice. During a cutscene in Chapter 4, André witnesses a French officer executing a fellow soldier for refusing to go over the top just before charging the German trench lines, and André himself meets this fate in the "Coward" endings.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several to the Resident Evil series. Notably the typewriter save points and storage boxes, a merchant who upgrades your weapons and buys treasure items, and having to burn bodies to keep a potentially worse enemy from appearing.
  • The nightmarish design of the Fort Vaux basement takes its cues from the Dark World areas of Silent Hill.
  • The ending-related achievements have some inspired theming:
    • The achievements for completing the last two chapters (Some Flaming Town, I Shall Not Fail That Rendezvous) were taken from Alan Seeger's I Have A Rendezvous With Death.
    • The achievement for getting the Trapped ending is named after Otto Dix's Sleepers of Fort Vaux.
    • The achievement for getting the Coward ending is named after Paths of Glory.
• Sprint Meter: The game features this, expended for sprinting, using melee weapons and using combat rolls.
• The Swarm: Dead bodies attract packs of vicious rats who will attack André on sight. The only way to stop them from appearing is to blow up their nests with grenades or to burn any bodies in the area.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: André has a particularly haunting one in the Shellshock ending.
• Translation Convention: Downplayed. The French people and documents talk in whatever the game's language is being set, but André requires an in-universe German Language book in order to read German documents.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: André is able to avoid rifle shots and melee weapon attacks with rolling, which does expend a bit of his stamina. Some German soldier types are able to disrupt André's rolls with kicks, which does next to no damage on it's own, but can prove dangerous if there's another enemy nearby just readying their attack.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: While André is able to use shovels, clubs, axes and rifles of the very kind the German soldiers use even if they don't drop them, he never gets to use bayonet rifles or flame throwers.
• Vader Breath: The German Gas Mask Mooks announce their presence with this.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Fort Vaux, which has been taken over by the Germans and features a more complex layout than any of the prior forts along with ominous aesthetics that border on Bizarrchitecture.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: André can occasionally encounter a German soldier undergoing a Freak Out, and he's able to effortlessly kill them and loot their cigarettes as well as a keepsake photo they may have been carrying.
• War Is Hell: The setting is the Battle of Verdun, meaning that our protagonist is fighting for his life in the trenches and having to watch his fellow soldiers die on a regular basis.
• The War Sequence: Some of the chapters climax with a sequence that tasks André with defending an area from waves of German soldiers until they'd give up. There is also the Raid in Chapter 4, that has André storm through the German front alongside the regiment from Fort St. Michel. All of that assuming André wouldn't end up taking a coward's way out.
• Weird Currency: Cigarettes are used to barter with The Merchant. Slightly averted on the fact that cigarettes were pretty much a currency for small-scale barter on the front in both world wars.