Don’t say a bad word about so-called “walking simulators” — some of the finest moments in indie games have come from Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch, Still Wakes the Deep, and, most recently, Mixtape. It’s just a shame that The Caribou Trail, which lands on PS5 this month, doesn’t quite make the list.
It has the chops on paper. This four-to-five-hour World War I experience, based on the infamous Gallipoli campaign, spent a couple of months as a PC exclusive (and gardnered a bunch of Very Positive feedback). I’m a sucker for the genre, and I also majored in WWI history at college, so this felt like a slam dunk.
Yet while The Caribou Trail is an interesting, unique, and occasionally memorable game, it trades the strengths of its key selling point for dull and repetitive mechanics, a hit-and-miss artistic direction, and uninspired wider worldbuilding.
The Fighting Irish
The Caribou Trail begins briefly, in medias res, at Beaumont Hamel in June 1916, ahead of the devastating Battle of the Somme. Seconds later, you’re transported back to 1915, as boats row to the shore of the Ottoman Empire’s Dardanelles Strait.
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Its pseudo cel-shaded art style is simple but pretty, but this immediately takes a back seat as you wonder whether you’re dealing with terrible voice acting, or just missing something. Thankfully, it’s the latter. You play Fisher, who initially sounds like he has the thickest New Hampshire accent ever recorded — surprisingly pronounced, yet still a bit Celtic. It’s not far off: Fisher and his company are part of the 1st Battalion Newfoundland Regiment, who arrived on Suvla Bay.
This proves to be The Caribou Trail’s biggest strength: a wholly unrepresented community in gaming, and an incredibly important one in First World War history. Following a hairy landing and bombardment, the pace drops dramatically.
The Caribou Trail is a short game, but not a quick one. Overlooking its rough edges, it’s punishingly slow. Walking is glacially slow, to the point it’s zombie-like; running is more like jogging, to be kind. It’s a clear decision, given its small, gradually expanding map, which portrays a realistic trench-based patch of the Mediterranean theater.
Fisher and his comrades are by far the biggest selling point. Managed by classic British “bad” guy Ogden, your standard stuffy Englishman with little regard for troop losses, The Caribou Trail does a half-decent job of capturing the beauty and warmth of the human psyche in times of war. Conversations are thoroughly believable; you know the personalities of certain people to the point that you compare them to people you know; you root for Fisher even though he’s just that little bit too distant to relate to.
War isn’t quite hell
On the other hand, its artistic approach and wider story arc underplay the horror of WW1 combat. In places — and at a distance — it seems foreboding or gruesome. However, any moments that would be guaranteed to be grim end up being almost benign, as dead bodies are intact, have strangely unemotional, open-eyed faces, and almost seem like mannequins buried under mud and sand.
Then there’s the core “cooking” minigame: one that embraces the infamous Huntley & Palmers biscuits, A.K.A. hard tack, that were so inedible that you needed to crush them with water to make anything of them. Each night, you return to camp to speak with your companions to chat about the day’s events, as you listlessly stamp your rations into mulch.
It’s incredibly boring, but it also actively undermines the narrative. You zone out from the important conversations you have. You don’t look up at your friends and register their emotions, instead staring into the pot and wishing for the sweet release of a final meal to shift the game into the next day.
The final push to the end is a long slog, too, should you overlook one simple task that isn’t well flagged — I was running around trenches for ages trying to find the undiscovered items that The Caribou Trail promised I’d missed. Still, I suppose that’s kind of the point; trenches weren’t exactly built by city planners.
Admittedly, the final act is easily the game’s strongest moment: a delightfully orchestrated ending that takes the edge off an otherwise very middling experience.
People power
There’s a clear, deep appreciation of the Irish-Canadian population, and this is The Caribou Trail’s biggest strength. However, it mishandles the story beyond these soldiers, relying on overused themes to drive home the madness and brutality of the First World War, especially when its visual approach just can’t quite seal this deal.
By the end, I found myself comparing the experience to 2024 indie darling Conscript — a fantastic yet harrowing subversion of common WWI tropes, injecting survival horror with a distinct PS1-era Resident Evil feel. It also underplayed the graphic horror of war with a top-down approach, but you feel suffocated by its key moments.
The Caribou Trail isn’t Conscript for all the right reasons, but it feels like it missed the opportunities to make the war feel less like a book reading and more like an immersive experience. Its VO cast and character building are superb, but the wider world just doesn’t quite deliver. At $13 on PS5 (less right now, at 20% off via PC), it’s worth trying out — and bear in mind I’m one voice, while there are hundreds of Very Positive Steam reviews — but this one just wasn’t for me.