Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

1916: Der unbekannte Krieg starts with an immediate, nicely cruel problem: escape the trenches before the creatures roaming them find you. From the first-person view, the maze of passages is disorienting enough on its own; once raptors enter the equation, every route becomes a risk assessment. The simple objective gives the short game focus, and the uncertainty of where the exit lies keeps you moving.

What makes the survival play more interesting than a straight hiding exercise is the small set of desperate answers at your disposal. Dead soldiers can supply notes as well as torn-off hands and feet, which you can throw to distract a raptor for a moment. A rifle offers limited bullets, flares can drive the creatures back temporarily, and a gas mask is required to push through one area. None of these sounds elaborate, but that scarcity is the point: wasting a flare or bullets can turn later exploration into a much nastier prospect.

The lack of a HUD works in the game’s favor. You have no friendly meter constantly telling you how safe you are, and limited damage means an encounter can become costly fast. Still, the trench layout can test your patience when you are lost rather than scared. Treat it as a short survival-horror detour built around tension and navigation, not a combat game where you can clear every threat.

Graphics

The trenches are shown in hazy greys, with heavy grain over the image and a first-person camera that keeps your attention down narrow routes and toward whatever may be ahead. It is a grim, deliberately obscured look that suits a battlefield full of dead soldiers and lurking raptors.

Story

The story gets its force from a sharp piece of pulp-horror escalation. You begin as a German soldier trying to get out of a World War I trench, discover that your fellow soldiers are dead, and then learn why: raptors are loose in the battlefield maze. It is an absurd premise played as straight survival horror, and that contrast is exactly why it sticks.

Notes left behind by the dead give you fragments to find as you search, rather than stopping the escape for long explanations. That approach fits the game’s scale. You are not settling into a broad war narrative; you are piecing together enough of a disaster to make the next dark corridor feel less safe.

The setting also does more than provide a costume. Bombardment sounds and the claustrophobic trench routes make escape feel like a battlefield problem before the dinosaur threat fully takes over. The result is a compact horror scenario with a memorable hook, even if its story is more effective as atmosphere than as a deeply developed drama.

Overall Experience

This is a game to try for its concentrated premise and its willingness to leave you vulnerable. The best moments come when you hear the war raging around you, realize you have no clear bearings, and must decide whether to distract a raptor, spend a precious resource, or retreat through ground you barely understand.

Its frustrations are tied to that same design. Maze navigation and limited health can make failure feel abrupt, especially when you are still learning which paths matter. Yet the game is short enough that the pressure rarely has time to become exhausting, and the restricted tools give each small discovery a useful purpose.

Give it a chance if you enjoy lean survival horror with an unusual historical-horror twist and do not need a long campaign to feel satisfied. 1916: Der unbekannte Krieg is rougher and more focused than a full-scale action adventure, but its raptors-in-the-trenches idea earns its weirdness through sustained tension.

Retro Replay Score

7.2/10