The Caribou Trail (2026)

I first experienced Caribou Trail earlier this year as part of a Steam NextFest demo. I was hooked by the story and knew this would be a game I'd definitely buy. Luckily, it released at a respectable price that I was comfortable paying for.

To start off the art style goes for what I always call the blocky, 1950s poster, look. The soldiers aren't photo-realistic, they have lots of squared off angles and boxy features, but not in a low-poly PS1 way. The other game I think of with this art style is Firewatch. It's an art style I really like. It lets characters be expressive, but doesn't have to worry about landing in the uncanny valley. The landscapes look like oil paintings and are good at setting the mood, whether a warm summer morning or a foreboding nighttime raid.

As for gameplay, Caribou Trail is similar to Firewatch in that it is a walking simulator. You spend most of your time navigating around the trenches using a map and compass, which it is fun to orientate your way around. You interact with the world through simple mouse clicks. They're used for climbing trenches, moving boxes, or eating stew. The game is broke down into little sections where you explore the trenches, complete a mission, eat dinner, then time jumps forward a few weeks or months to repeat that loop again, just under different conditions. It's enough engagement to make this one of the better walking simulators.

So, the bread and butter of Caribou Trail is the story. You are cast in the role of a WWI soldier in the trenches of Gallipoli. You come ashore as part of a regiment of Newfoundlanders. The main thesis of this game is highlighting the history of the Newfoundlanders during the Great War and Newfoundland culture, including their food and slang. We meet the fellow soldiers in our regiment, they all have fun personalities, but only a few I found were really memorable, like Cliff. Then there's your main squad, your b'ys if you will. You play as Fish, a soldier who has one foot in cynicism & one foot in sentimentalism. Then there's Gordon, he's a bit of a swashbuckling rogue who chose joining the Army over jail time. He's a hothead and a shyster. And last is Lonnie, who is the young, sensitive artist of a soldier who you know from jump street that he's not surviving this game. They are all led by Colonel Ogden, a British officer who is too pompous for his own good. He's always seen as an out of touch twit since he's a posh Englishman in charge of some blue collar Newfoundlanders. He does have a moment of weakness as the war wages on, where he talks about how he only got made an officer because he went to university and the soldiers sympathize him more, learning that he has to write letters to the families of every soldier killed in action.

Spoilers from this point on, skip to “All in all” .The Newfoundlanders are sent to Gallipoli to keep up the fight after the Australians were wiped out. The story for the game is about life in the trenches, mixed with the suspense of a ghost story. Your three guys are sent out to find a downed pilot and during that time, Fish is injured and starts seeing the dead men stare at him with glowing eyes. These moments of suspense are nice and well done, except the one at the end I think went on too long. Following that, it's a lot of Fish, Gordon, & Lonnie musing on life, war, and ghosts. Lonnie being a big believer in ghosts and Gordon being a devout skeptic. One time you are sent out to collect dog tags of the dead and encounter a Turkish commander. He waxes philosophically at you, about how his people are fighting their land & the Newfoundlanders are fighting for a shipping lane. Finally during one of your nightly meals, the guys talk about how they would stand up for each other. Fish does this by literally standing up, and goads Lonnie into standing up, where he is summarily domed by a Turkish sniper. Again, the kind of story this game was telling I knew we weren't all surviving. I figured both Lonnie & Gordon to bite it by the end of the game.

With Lonnie dead, Gordon immediately seeks revenge and tasks you to help him kill the sniper, while Fish is spiraling in his own guilt for getting Lonnie killed. The writing is good here, Gordon very much realizes he's acting on instincts, but he doesn't want to stop and think about what happened. When you find the sniper, he surrenders giving you the classic “Do you shoot the man whose surrendering, the same man who just killed your friend, in war?” If you chose to take him prisoner, Gordon does shoot him, so he's a dead man regardless.

The story ends with Fish & Gordon grappling with Lonnie's death. You pack up his backpack to send to his parents, this was when the story really gut punched me in the feels. You find a birthday card his mom sent him and it got me. Gordon regrets how he treated Lonnie and starts to open up to the idea of ghosts. Fish struggles with his guilt still and has to write a letter to Lonnie's sister, Mary, whose a nurse on a nearby hospital ship, as you had written to her previously. With the lengths the story went to paint Fish as this lonely orphan, I thought this letter writing would turn into Fish finding a partner in Mary, it does not got that route. Finally, the army retreats from Gallipoli, so Fish and Gordon devise a Home Alone-esque decoy to distract the Turks while the army files out of the beach. The game ends with Fish having one last ghostly encounter where he's tormented by Lonnie until he is led to the beachhead.

We learn that later on the Newfoundlanders were sent to fight in France, which appears to be their bigger claim to fame in history. Gallipoli was their warm-up act, while they would fight and die in France, losing 90% of their regiment at the Somme. The game's story is bookended by a framing narrative of Fish telling a ghost story around a campfire in France to a group of new soldiers.

One thing I think the game struggled with is tone, mainly at the end. The game starts out like a sort of war adventure film. You all know that slog that's coming, but everyone's in high spirits, you've got kooky characters who are setting up moonshine stills, everyone's talking about making Fish'n'Brewis like at home. Of course as the story goes on, the mood sours as trenchfoot and the horrors of war settle in. The b'ys keep their humor as a way to cope, something common to the sorta blue collar guys these soldiers are. Then there's the story after Lonnie dies where everything is very serious and dramatic and dour. It's a natural progression of the story, but then when we go into the last part of the story where you set up the decoy, the story goes back into that cheery, high adventure feeling. It's a shift seeing Fish be back to sort of happy and energetic after all he'd been through. I get that spirits are high because the soldiers get to leave Gallipoli and they are excited for that. This tone shift also relates to the ghost story sections. When Lonnie tells his ghost stories, they are usually more positive ghosts. They are ghosts that help and watch over people, showing them a safe harbor in a storm. When Fish has his ghostly encounters they are more spooky and psychologically terrifying. That's to say they don't seem helpful. Now, I could chalk some of that up to being more Fish's war trauma manifesting as terrifying ghosts vs the supernatural itself.

All in all, I really liked Caribou Trail. It's a short game, so I couldn't recommend paying more than $10 for it. You get a good and impactful story that does a good job at being a WWI not focused on action, but on the life of soldiers during the downtime. It's characters are engaging for the short time you spend with them and you could tell the developers were passionate about bringing the history of Newfoundlanders in WWI to the public and I appreciate it. I loved learning about Newfoundland culture, like Fish'n'Brewis, Ugly Sticks, and Jacky Lanterns. If you like narrative games or WWI history I recommend Caribou Trail.