You've got to love Steam Next Fest. The video team has already put together a list of its must-play Steam Next Fest demos, but there's just so many new and exciting demos to try that we couldn't fit them all into one listicle! Well, OK, I guess we could have done, but that would have been one very long list video indeed...
On the video player above (or over on our YouTube channel if you'd prefer), you'll be able to watch today's livestream, where I took a look at the upcoming Steam Next Fest demo for Conscript. Published by Team17, Conscript is a survival horror experience set in the trenches of the Battle of Verdun. While this isn't the first time we've seen a horror game set during the First World War, Conscript still feels rather unique, even though its developer Jordan Mochi admits that he has drawn a lot of inspiration from classic horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
While I love a good retro-inspired horror game as much as the next person, one of the first things I noticed when I played the demo was how slow and clunky the combat was. This is certainly in keeping with games like the first Resident Evil but modern gamers may be put off by what appears to be a very sluggish and unforgiving control scheme. In Conscript you can only shoot, reload and melee attack whilst standing still and I found this very frustrating during the opening 30 minutes of the demo when I had to single handedly hold off a German trench invasion with only a rifle and a shovel. This mainly involved kiting enemies around the trenches until I could get in the right position to shoot at them or bonk them on the head, something that ended up feeling a bit like being chased around a Pac-Man maze by a bunch of Stahlhelm-wearing ghosts.
During that section I died a couple of times which felt unfair to me but, once I'd perfected my timing and gotten used to the movement, I managed to get past this section with a fair amount of ammo remaining. From then on, things calmed down slightly and the demo began to feel much more like a Resident Evil clone. There's a limited inventory for instance, where a key can take up the same amount of room as a rifle. There's a claustrophobic maze of tunnels to explore that are peppered with hostile Germans and there are puzzles to solve and doors to unlock that will help you move deeper into the dark recesses of the trenches.
By the end of the 90 minute live stream, I had gotten much more comfortable with Conscript's combat and this allowed me to get sucked in by its old school 'Spencer Mansion' style exploration. Trenches looped around and back on themselves providing shortcuts for later in the game, a found shovel allowed me to batter open previously barricaded doors and I even discovered a trapdoor underneath a random crate that led to a pitch black tunnel network that I was too scared to explore. I find this type of gameplay really moorish, so I'm glad I stuck it out through those early annoyances as everything past that point felt a lot more rewarding.
If you want to witness the horrors of war for yourself, Conscript's 2022 demo is available to download now over on Steam, but this will be updated on Monday with the build that I played for the live stream.