This Canadian war game tells an incredible story about Newfoundland soldiers

When it comes to Canada’s incredibly talented and diverse lineup of developers, there aren’t many quite like Unreliable Narrators.

In 2024, the Montreal-based indie studio released Two Falls (Nishu Takuatshina), a narrative adventure game set in the 17th century Canadian wilderness. Games that take place in Canada are few and far between to begin with, and Two Falls stood out all the more for its Indigenous story about a French woman and Innu hunter, developed in close partnership with First Nations members.

Now, Unreliable Narrators is working on another title about a different, yet similarly oft-overlooked, part of Canada’s history. Enter The Caribou Trail, an adventure game following a young man named Fisher of the Newfoundland Regiment in 1915 as it takes part in the Gallipoli Campaign, the Anglo-French operation that sought to control the Dardanelles strait, capture Constantinople, and push the Ottoman Empire out of WWI.

More than 1,000 Newfoundlanders landed at Suvla Bay on September 30, and eventually, they captured what became known as Caribou Hill in an attempt to deal with heavy sniper fire. Over the course of four months, roughly 30 Newfoundlanders died in action, with an additional 10 passing due to disease.

While there have been many games about war, few, if any, ever explore this particular side of it, making The Caribou Trail particularly interesting. In an interview with MobileSyrup, Unreliable Narrators said the idea came from the studio co-founder, who had a relative who was part of the Newfoundland Regiment. From there, the development team saw a rich storytelling opportunity.

“What’s interesting about that story and why we chose to do it is that Newfoundland, at the time of the Great War, didn’t have an army at all. It’s just a bunch of fishermen and lumberjacks and whatnot who just arose to the occasion,” explains Francis Rufiange, Unreliable Narrators’ lead designer.

“And so it was the sense of these people who should not have been there. They’re not experienced soldiers. There wasn’t any military in Newfoundland. But yet, they formed a regiment […] that’s a story worth telling in itself, about all the sacrifices that they made. They accomplished a lot, and it wasn’t expected of them to do so.”

While he notes that WWI is arguably a more “commercial” historical setting, especially compared to something like Two Falls, it’s still radically different with its focus on Newfoundland.

“It’s this regiment from a remote place in Canada who are just regular people that go and live through the most hellish landscapes and conflicts that there was at the time, and some of them lived to tell the tale,” he says.

Something else that should prove interesting when it comes to The Caribou Trail’s depiction of Canadian history is that Newfoundland wasn’t actually a part of the country during this time. It wasn’t until 1949 when the Dominion of Newfoundland became the 10th and final province to join the Canadian Federation. This, too, made the Regiment a particularly fascinating subject for Unreliable Narrators to explore.

“They were this tiny fishing community isolated from their European main central power. And they had this strong desire to prove themselves. When the news of the war came over the Atlantic and all of that, there was a this great push to show that, yes, Newfoundlanders are capable, and they can contribute to their nation,” says Unreliable Narrators designer Louis Nantel.

Fisher and some of his fellow soldiers. (Image credit: Unreliable Narrators)

Of course, there are many games about war, and the majority of them feature some sort of shooter gameplay. And sure enough, Rufiange admits that there were debates during early pre-production about going this more commercial route, but ultimately, it was decided to do something different.

“With the team that we have, it didn’t feel right to make an FPS or very action-heavy game. It’s always been for us, emotional storytelling first. But then the follow-up of this is, ‘Okay, how do we tell that story that’s a lot about fighting and combat and horror and doing things to other humans that are unimaginable?’” he explains.

“In that sense, in a first-person shooter, the act of killing is very gamified. You get points and killstreaks and whatnot. There’s an audience for that. Obviously, on our end, for the audience that we’re aiming for, people that love narrative games, people that love historical games, how do we include those themes without making it feel gratuitous or gamified?”

And so while you’re not routinely mowing down soldiers with a rifle, The Cariboul Trail will feature the ability to die, something that was absent in Two Falls. But even still, this isn’t meant to make the game challenging mechanically, says Nantel, but rather to highlight that this is “just the reality of something that can happen” out on the battlefront.

“The challenge is more how the story challenges you and what your character and the characters around you go through,” explains Rufiange. “Like a war film, for example, that has some difficult themes in there that you have to come to terms with.”

The Caribou Trail aims to be a more psychological depiction of war instead of another bombastic first-person shooter. (Image credit: Unreliable Narrators)

Instead, Unreliable Narrators wants the difficulty to come from learning more about the harrowing conditions that these inexperienced Newfoundlanders found themselves in.

“We didn’t want to tell a traditional story that you would find in an FPS about making these huge advancements and conquering this part, or moving the line for capturing or recapturing this village, or whatever. It was more about the human side, and the human toll of the war, and Gallipoli pretty much happens at the start of the war, and is such a disaster,” Rufiange says. “It’s such a disaster, both in terms of lives lost, yes, but also just the complete mess that they were thrown in and the living conditions.”

It’s this story of survival and “making the best of a horrible situation” that he says Unreliable Narrators wanted to focus on. “They’ve trained for months and months, and here they are, sent to this place — at the time, the Ottoman Empire, what is Turkiye today — thinking they’re going to accomplish a great thing. But then reality hits them in the face. So it was almost like a coming-of-age; they all matured immediately as they arrived there. It’s no longer a summer camp — it’s a disaster.”

“I think a lot of WWI stories are about learning what modern war even is, and I think this definitely fits into that box as well,” adds Nantel. “There were a lot of mistakes made from on the officers side, a lot of mistakes made strategically and all in all, a great waste of human life, really. And I think that’s a part of the story that is really interesting to talk about.”

The Caribou Trail features narrative-driven exploration. (Image credit: Unreliable Narrators)

There were also a few areas in which Unreliable Narrators was able to build upon the work it had done with Two Falls. For one, Nantel notes that the team “made so many mistakes” on its first game, which has allowed it to be “much smarter” now in terms of how it’s approached technical systems and planning.

But something else that’s improved with The Caribou Trail is the team’s research process. As Nantel explains, it was “very difficult” to study Two Falls’ depiction of Innu traditions and 17th century early settler Canada, outside of whatever records that Indigenous communities themselves had preserved. With The Caribou Trail, however, there’s much more information readily available about the Newfoundland Regiment and Gallipoli Campaign.

To create the game, Rufiange says some of the team went to some “great museums” in Newfoundland, including The Rooms, which has a section dedicated entirely to the province’s regiment in WWI. They also spoke with historians across Canada.

But while the developers carefully studied the time period itself, they say they didn’t want to base any characters on specific people in history.

“We decided this is going to be an entirely fictional story, but in the confines of the experience of the Newfoundland regiment and where they lived. We didn’t want to make some real-world associations; it’s a very sensitive subject with people who lost their lives and everything,” says Rufiange. “So we wanted to just make our own story and be respectful of the whole experience that the Newfoundland Regiment had in Gallipoli and after that in France and other places.”

The front lines in The Caribou Trail. (Image credit: Unreliable Narrators)

Ultimately, Unreliable Narrators hopes that gaming’s unique status as an interactive art form will help engage more people in important and underrepresented historical stories like Two Falls and The Caribou Trail.

“It’s identification and just the idea of being immersed in a world and having to make decisions — having to interact yourself with it, having to engage actively with the medium as a character in the story,” Nantel says of the educational potential of games.

“That’s why all of our games have had first-person viewpoints, because we want to put you in the body of the character themselves. That’s what it’s about. And this allows us to show you that historical period, to make you live it really much better than we could through a documentary or movie or something like that […] It’s really about embodying somebody that lived through this time period in this historical setting, so you can better understand what their challenges were.”

The Caribou Trail will launch on PC (Steam and EGS) and PS5 later this year. A free demo is now available on Steam.

Image credit: Unreliable Narrators