#632: Camouflet
Terrifying WW1 tunnel rat roguelike
Initial release: Oct 30, 2022
Platform: PC
Developer: Rubber Ducky Snacks
The first World War was an ugly glimpse into the future of humanity: gone were the days of war being seen as a bit of sport, the natural consequence of nations playing their games against each other. The Great War was brutally violent and destructive, turning battlefields from pristine green to smoke-choked wastelands, pocked with shell craters and littered with corpses. To the men and women who were there, it must have seemed like hell on earth. Or, perhaps, hell beneath the earth: tunnelers were tasked with digging their way beneath no man’s land to place explosives under enemy positions. It was dark and terrifying; the threat of gas and tunnel collapse was constant, as was the possibility of the enemy, digging their own tunnels, breaking through into your own. Sounds scary, right? Rubber Ducky Snacks thought so too, that’s why they made Camouflet.
It’s a pretty simple game in terms of structure. You’ve been sent down into a collapsed British mine — alone — and your job is to, all by yourself, dig your way to the German lines and plant explosives at four key locations. You’ve got only a shovel, what weapons you can find, and a map that you access by looking down. In practice it plays a little like Minecraft, I suppose — while you can’t dig up or down, you can dig pretty much any direction within the confines of the map, and you’ll often break into enemy tunnels (which are marked by much more regular use of support beams) and abandoned chambers and mine tunnels. You’re at no risk for the tunnels collapsing, as far as I can tell, but pockets of gas can make digging dangerous, and of course there are Germans digging around looking for you. You’ll have to listen for them digging to know if they’re close. Sometimes the fighting above gets pretty intense and the whole tunnel system grows dim with dust.
Gameplay more or less feels a bit rogue-lite. If you die, your map gets erased, so you’d better commit the tunnel system to memory. (It does fortunately keep track of the bombs you need to place, so if you die, the bomb you had will be where you dropped it.) Weapons dot the map — pistols with a bullet or two, grenades, dynamite you can place on walls. You’ll need to use them wisely to deal with the Germans crawling around the tunnels, as they’re armed with MP18s (a bit anachronistically if the dates on telegrams laying around the tunnels are any indication) and can easily take you down. If you want an extra challenge, you can toggle an option to lose all your gathered weapons. I don’t, so I didn’t.
What really makes Camouflet work is that for such a simple premise it is terrifying. The tunnels are dark and mostly not lit; your flashlight only illuminates so far. The sounds of combat above are accompanied by shaking and the falling of dust and small stones; at any moment, you could dig your way into an ambush, or gas. It’s a small piece of the sheer terror of the war, and brutally effective for it.
Camouflet doesn’t seem to have a lot of content going for it. It doesn’t really need to, of course, but I would have liked to have seen more randomization, more options for defense or offense, more chambers to stumble into. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty entertaining time, while it lasts.
