All the WWI games I've played on this site (with a few that turned out to not actually be WWI games, but were on the WWI tag anyway). Occasionally good! Mostly... not.
To put it briefly: play Heartland, maybe play Cargo Breach, Major Doctor Bing Bong, and syuzhet (in that order of preference), and you really don't need to play anything else on this list. Two of the games on this list are broken, so it's possible they might be good, but I'll never know. If you can get them to work and recommend them, or have any other WWI games you recommend (on itch.io or otherwise), drop me an ask on Tumblr at aceredshirt13!
Not Yet Played/Completed
A quiet, sad, atmospheric game that can be played in a very brief amount of time. I'm not entirely certain it's a WWI game, exactly - after all, the people discussing being invaded bear English-language names, and there wasn't anywhere that spoke English that was being invaded during WWI, so if anything it would have to be alternate history - but it's certainly about family and war and the fear and ambiguity of it all. Good game!
A well-put together text-adventure whose competence pleasantly surprised me given the... general quality of the WWI games on this website lmao. I only wish there was a bit more story to it! But it's definitely one of the best I've played on here.
I mean, the art was good, and the gameplay wasn't bad or anything... I think this game's premise just stressed me out too much. I was having too much trouble trying to determine whether or not it was overly insensitive to enjoy it. But you might like it, it's an arcade style sort of thing - though it's really hard to manage all the soldiers coming in...
Very beautiful art! I admit I didn't entirely understand what the game was about though... but it feels very personal to the artist, so it's probably more important to them than it is to me.
I wanted to like this game, I really did. Atmosphere is very cool, concept is so absurd that it sounded awesome, and it's already pretty rare that you get to play as a German WWI soldier in, well, anything! But this game's number one weakness is the one that makes it not fun to play - that is, the complete lack of any sort of save function. You see, the velociraptors, once they see you, will always attack you (even if you have already thrown them a severed limb - why is my player character even strong enough to tear off entire limbs with his bare hands? That felt like a slightly "ow the edge" detail in its lack of realism (though I guess maybe I shouldn't be complaining about realism in the Velociraptor WWI Game, but hey), and one that could have been solved by there being corpses with already-severed limbs/heads/etc. to use), they will always run faster than you, and there is basically nothing you can do but die. Which wouldn't be too obnoxious, if it weren't for the fact that you get sent aaaaaall the way back to the beginning, walking through the same area you did the first time, every single time, just to go back to the extremely mazelike trenches with the random wandering dinos that are impossible to hide from and will kill you again should you accidentally come across them. Throwing the limbs over the heads of the velociraptors to make them follow that instead, as described, would be a great mechanic, except that half the time it doesn't work - they move so fast that often my throwing animation would just straight up fail and the velociraptor would kill me - not to mention that throwing limbs as preemptive velociraptor treats doesn't always work, sometimes makes them chase you anyway, and sometimes makes the severed limb randomly disappear for no reason even when you try to pick it up. And then I'd get attacked, and die, and get sent all the way back.
I was determined to keep going for a while, mainly because I was interested in finding out about this world, but... from what little I know about it, it sounds like nothing is really even explained about why the velociraptors are there. There's ambiguity about whether it's real or a hallucination, but if they're hallucinations, why would they kill you? How was I able to get shot while in an incredibly dark trench, when I can't imagine a single angle in the world where an Allied soldier would be able to see me? How am I meant to get my German boyfriend to translate the German letters for me (according to them, the German in the game is overall... not quite accurate, with "Controls" being translated as the false friend "Kontrollen" as the clearest example, but the letters are still understandable) when whenever I try to hit the screenshot button combo, my character puts down the letter before it can be screenshotted - and playing on windowed mode cuts off the bottom part of the game screen? I'd love to know how the weapon, the flare, the gas mask, all of it factors into the gameplay, but without a save function or reliable methods of avoiding the dinosaurs, it feels like an exercise in frustration and futility... Maybe I'm just bad at the game, but that's how I felt.
The idea of carving a violin and learning things about war history as you do is great, and the facts included in the game were quite heartbreaking. I was especially glad to see Walter Tull mentioned, since his status as a black lieutenant in the British Army is oft-forgotten, and I also appreciated the acknowledgement and dedication to the nurse who helped people escape the war, rather than only appreciating those who supported the war effort. Unfortunately, the greatest flaw with this is that it's not, like... actually a good game. All the gameplay is just sort of trying to carve a violin by clicking, clicking, dragging, clicking, over and over again, often without clearly defined places where you're meant to click, until all the wood is gone. So it's a lot of tedium with some sad and compelling facts in the middle of it.
A genuinely fascinating idea for a game - unfortunately, the gameplay, such that it was, was rather tedious and uninteresting, and the writing wasn't subtle or good enough to really invest me in the storyline.
I remember this game really epitomizing the kind of writing where you can tell the author has memorized every single military strategy and the specs of every weapon and vehicle in the entire war but focus on this over actually telling a compelling story with human characters. That kind of feels like what's happening here - you are not terribly motivated in what decisions you make, because you feel no real urgency or investment in the narrative. The typos don't really help in this regard...
The writing's not very compelling and has errors in grammar and such, but probably most glaring is that at one point it calls the Germans the "axis". They were. They were not the Axis in WWI.
Well, this one did thankfully not call the German forces the Axis Powers like the other one did, but it had the same spelling mistakes and lack of compelling writing.
A very busted Bejeweled rip-off where there's no real sense of progression and the timer actually stopped working after a while, leading to me essentially being stuck in the game forever.
This flight sim was so hard to control that I didn't even know where I was most of the time. I flew for quite some time, hoping to get to whatever the monsters were, but it took so long and was monotonous enough that I eventually gave up.
Unfortunately, the writing kinda put me off this one... there were a lot of typos, and the dialogue also felt much too modern at times for the era, nor did the characters compel me particularly.
Interesting idea - I really liked the inclusion of real letters - but the combination of typos, clunky gameplay, and numerous glitches (clipping, audio playing over itself, sort of aimless gameplay) meant that I don't really recommend it.
The controls, physics, and assets weren't the best, and a man can only listen to Danger Zone so many times before he starts to lose his mind, I fear.
Very cute idea - I love men kissing across enemy lines - but beyond that there wasn't much to it - it was literally just walking around and finding men to kiss and nothing else - so it kind of felt more like a meme than a game.
I'm not really sure why the steampunk element was in this game other than the ticking clock as an aesthetic...? It didn't come up much, to the point where I often forgot it wasn't just a regular WWI game, and the ticking clock still could have applied even without it. Either way, the writing had typos and I wasn't terribly attached to the characters from it, so I don't really recommend it.
I was unable to make it very far in this game because of the bizarre and almost certainly seizure-inducing choice to represent old film footage by having the screen shake constantly. I can take a lot in terms of visual effects, but this gave me such a headache I had to quit.
The humor was pretty funny in this game, but unfortunately the gameplay was kind of monotonous. It took forever to watch the enemies go through, and there wasn't a lot of satisfaction in it.
The number one thing you should know about this game is that despite being on the WWI tag, and despite mentioning the "Kaizer", it is in no way a WWI game. This is a WWII game. The country of this game is so blatantly a thinly-disguised fictionalized Nazi Germany that I wonder if the creator didn't mix up the two wars. The art's actually pretty good, but beyond a single line at the beginning of the game in the main character's father's letter where he says to value love over violence, the writing is... not - and when it's a kinetic novel with no choices, gameplay, or interaction beyond clicking to advance the story, writing is quite literally everything. Here, though, it's very, very on the nose, and the characters aren't terrible deep, and the whole thing feels a little like a 14-year-old who just learned about Nazis for the first time and wanted to make a game about how they were bad. The ending twist was sort of neat, but I wasn't invested enough in the rest of the story for it to be worth the journey there...
The most interesting thing about this game is definitely the ability to make Paul Bäumer be a dick for no reason. Like when Kat is telling Müller not to be so callous about asking for the dying Kemmerich's boots, and instead of trying to convince Müller to be more empathetic, Paul can be like "actually I think I should have his boots." This is a very funny and terrible thing you are able to do. Aside from that, though, the game more or less reads like a rather dull and very rushed summary of the events of the book with choices thrown in, which is especially apparent with a book as well-written and emotionally-affecting as All Quiet is. You're much better off just reading the novel.
I was really excited for this one, but the writing unfortunately just wasn't up to par with my hopes. There were typos, I didn't really connect with the characters, the ending was abrupt (and also glitched? a character died in my run but it said he survived the war with a wounded leg??), and by far the strangest part was the main character speaking in a Southern American accent. Even though he's Canadian. Huh? Is this meant to be shorthand for him being from a small town? I'm not Canadian myself, but I asked my friend who is, and she said she's never heard a Canadian say "y'all" or "ain't" as part of a typical accent there, unlike in the Southern US. This was especially weird, given that Private Bell was a real person, who I suspect didn't speak like that...
There wasn't a lot to this game, I suppose? The entire extent of it was just plugging cords into the right spots (and sometimes even when I plugged it into the right spots, it said I'd done it incorrectly, so I'm not sure if that's a glitch or if I just didn't properly understand how it worked), but I figured that might be a great way to tell a story, and it... wasn't, really? There didn't seem to be one. The cords not going back to where they were originally also means everything gets really clunky and hard to maneuver after a while.
This game just didn't feel like it had a lot to it. The scrolling shmup aspect just went on and on and on, and the planes didn't behave anything like actual planes do. I really did try to wait it out and reach the end of the mission, but it was just too monotonous to try again and again.
Styled after Papers, Please, but Papers, Please's strength is the snippets of humanity you witness amidst the paper pushing. The soldiers in this game, however, are a faceless nothing - you don't get to know them, you don't get to hear their stories, you don't get to feel guilt like you do in Papers, Please when you turn desperate people away, or feel joy when you bend the rules to aid people who need it. It's quite easy to be callous when the people are nothing but names on a page, and even if that was the point, there just wasn't enough here for me to be interested.
While I did like some of the stories in this, overall the walking speed was too slow and the background too tedious and mazelike to be enjoyable. The characters told stories, yes, but they didn't really talk to you personally, nor did the characters talk to each other, so they ended up feeling like something isolated instead of dead comrades from different walks of life. I couldn't convince myself to get all the way through to the end - not after 45 minutes of slow, slow walking.
Mostly what I remember about this game is that the controls were weird, I couldn't even see the bullet that hit me, and it felt more like I was in some kind of forest than near any sort of trench. Apparently it's unfinished anyhow, but regardless it wasn't very good.
Previously I'd said that this game didn't download, but I downloaded the Ludum Dare version and that seemed to work fine. However, if there was something to this game other than "your tiny character walks around extremely slowly and can see random names, regiments, and years/ages of death on the gravestones when you mouse over them", I did not find it. So it didn't really do anything for me.
This game looks really neat, actually, and I was so interested to know what sort of fantasy/death element was going on with the poppies... but unfortunately the game refused to progress (it said I needed to go back and talk to my commander, but whenever I talked to him he said the same dialogue he'd said at the beginning, and I couldn't find any other way to move the story forward). I left a comment on the developer's page noting the bug, but I haven't heard back...
I wanted to play this game because it looked really interesting, but unfortunately when I downloaded it it wouldn't let me move past the title screen... alas.