Dead Man's Hill is a detailed, parser-driven World War I trench combat simulation in which you play a German soldier at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. It's the work of Arno von Borries, who created the Japan-set work-rambling-life sim Gotomomi for IFComp 2015. There are a few technical ambition and technical verbosity similarities between the games, but while I got off on the wrong foot with Gotomomi through no fault of anyone in particular – an anecdote that didn't qualify as a worthy review of the game at the time and which I thus didn't share with anyone, but which I may recount in another post now that a year has passed – I got off very much on the correct feet with Dead Man's Hill.
The game's HELP frames proceedings grimly and efficiently with a potted history of the horrors of Verdun and explicit how-to-play info. A how-to-play can overwhelm in some games, but here it accurately telegraphed that Dead's scale was going to be detailed and micro-leaning. It made me feel strangely confident about my pending experience, even as I was anxious due to the framing text's foregrounding of grueling trench violence.
When the game opens, you and a couple of German soldiers under your command find yourselves forced into a French-held trench beyond no-man's-land. The trench maze environment is arranged differently in each game. Searching for a way out leads you into one violent encounter after another with the French soldiers. The game mechanics focus on the minutiae of manipulating weapons and giving orders. The game tracks both of each soldier's hands, what object is in each hand or being clasped by both, and makes you manually wield, unequip, load, reload, share and discard a range of weapons ranging from bayonets and pistols to flareguns and grenades. The result is a technical orchestration of death as you and your enemies stab, shoot, flamethrow and grenade each other into oblivion in detailed steps and with detailed results. Health is tracked, injuries are tracked and listed verbosely, and death-dealing technology is all over the place. You can save but there's no UNDOing. The situation in the trenches is also dynamic. New soldiers can join you, enemies can be surprised, or ambush you, or rush to avoid a thrown grenade. The dying mutter about their loved ones, or being thirsty, or just non-sequiturs.
I found this all extremely impressive and engrossing as I probed at the spectacle of pointless death and wondered if it might be possible to survive, but I also had to acknowledge numerous apparent bugs and oversights. Importantly, I believe the game is more than over the line of what I perceive to be its intended effect; that effect is not diminished by the bugs enough to pull it backwards over the line, but it is diminished.
There are passage-of-time issues: for instance, enemies react quicker to a grenade thrown by yourself than they do to a grenade you order another soldier to throw. There are major redundancies in a lot of the damage reports, with duplicate or irrelevant injuries being listed along with relevant ones. The game asks many effect-muting disambiguation questions (Throw the primed grenade or the harmless grenade? Stab the dead Frenchman or the alert and healthy Frenchman?). There's the pronoun issue of 'myself' appearing instead of 'me' when you're attacked.
Admittedly some of the redundancies could be interpreted as a hyperbolic demonstration of the degree of violence that's being visited on soldiers' bodies, but they still read as bugs. In all other areas, verbosity and a kind of pedantry are part of the emphasis on the mechanics of the weapons:
UNEQUIP MACHINE GUN
WIELD GRENADE
PRIME GRENADE
THROW GRENADE EAST
EQUIP AUTOMATIC
EQUIP LANTERN
LIGHT LANTERN
LOAD AUTOMATIC
No abbreviations for any of the basic commands are made available, which I found to be a (probably unintentionally) effective inconvenience in terms of generating gruel for the player. The matter-of-fact reporting can also be chilling:
Ebert fired his flame thrower at the Frenchman.
The Frenchman burned to death, flailing his arms, shrieking in pain and panic.
The Frenchman was killed instantly.
The only complaint I have about the game thematically is a very minor one, specifically relating to one moment in the introductory text. Its final line lays blame for this kind of warfare on mindless patriotism. It's not that I necessarily disagree, only that the entity of patriotism is not manifest in the mechanics or prose content of the game proper. The game reads as being about the futility of all these battlefront deaths and the anal mechanics of the weapons that enable them. It doesn't read as being about the dangers of patriotism. Setting that aside, I found Dead Man's Hill to be a thoroughly absorbing experience whose design and programming I admire, even though there's still need for a lot of technical revision. The game satisfies both as a war simulation with measurable mechanics and tactical elements, and as a conceptual piece with overarching ideas about its content.
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