Trenches - World War 1 Horror Survival Game

My instinct with short indie horrors is always the same: check whether the atmosphere carries the runtime, because mechanics this stripped-down rarely have enough surface area to hide behind. With Trenches, the answer is mostly yes - for a first run, at least. You play as James R., a soldier who wakes up behind enemy lines in 1917 and needs to collect nine clues to find a way out, all while an unkillable supernatural entity stalks the labyrinth around you. The core loop is closer to a Slender-Man-style objective hunt than anything resembling a war game: crouch to muffle footsteps, duck under bunk beds or into narrow passageways when the monster closes in, use your trench whistle to ping nearby clues - but know that the whistle also broadcasts your position straight to whatever is hunting you. Throw bottles for distraction, mind your stamina bar, and pray you don't end up in a dead end. The audio is the real load-bearing wall here. The developer built a soundscape where brief silences exist only to make the next noise more shocking - distant soldiers crying, the creak of wooden floorboards underfoot, the monster mimicking familiar sounds to draw you out. Reviewers across the board flag headphones as non-negotiable, and the one-touch-death design means every footstep carries actual weight. A no-jump-scare mode exists for players who want the tension without the volume spikes, and it is a thoughtful addition, though most of the atmosphere lives in those loud sudden moments. Real WW1 photographs and wall scrawls scattered through the trenches add a grounding layer of grim history that the genre rarely bothers with. The problems are real and worth knowing before you commit. The monster AI has a readable pattern - once you learn to move opposite its audio cues, it stops being frightening and starts being a routing puzzle. The trench corridors are visually repetitive to the point of genuine disorientation, which works thematically but compounds into frustration when you realize you have run the same junction three times. The hardcore single-save, restart-from-zero-on-death system will filter out casual players fast, especially in a maze where dead ends are frequent. And the runtime is short - a confident first clear sits around an hour. Clue locations randomize between runs, which adds some replayability, but the monster's eroded scare factor limits how much motivation there is to go back. For a solo-developer project this is a focused, coherent horror experience with a genuinely clever central gimmick. The whistle mechanic forces real risk-reward decisions in a way that most Slender-adjacent games never manage. That said, buyers should go in knowing this is a single-session horror hit, not a content-dense game. It fits the sub-five-dollar tier well: low commitment, high atmosphere for that first blind run, limited reason to return once the jump scare timings are memorised.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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