Conflict makes for good video games, and nothing says conflict like a good old fashioned war, so it’s no surprise that a lot of games deal with the subject. War doesn’t just make for good video games, it’s a setting heavily utilized in games in general. What do you think is happening in chess after all? Most war games are focused on the combatants but they are not the only ones in the battlefields and they are definitely not the only ones affected by wars. 11 Bit Studios, a Polish studio founded by former CD Projekt and Metropolis Software developers and staff, aims to shed light on the non-combatants we don’t usually hear about in with their recently released simulation game, This War of Mine.
In This War of Mine you take control of a group of survivors as they try to make it through an unnamed war torn country. They come from different walks of life and so they have different skills. For example, someone who is an athlete might be better at physical tasks. While a character that was food critic is great at cooking. Each character has their own text bio, and as the days go by and different traumatic events occur, you can take a look a the character’s diary to see how they are reacting to their new lives. The writing does a good job of illustrating the terrible situation the characters are in and will likely make you form at least some bond with your group.
During the day you will cook and craft improvements.
Gameplay in this war of mine is divided between two broad parts: daytime and nighttime. During the day, your survivors must cook, eat, craft things, and in general make their place more livable. You are confined to your dwelling during the day, as snipers will shoot you on sight if you leave. At night however, you can select a person to go out and scavenge for food, medical supplies, and even basic things like books, woods, and junk to use as basic building materials. You will start running out of everything quickly. Even junk, which initially feels plentiful in your shelter, runs low after a couple of days as you craft everything from cooking stoves to weapons and tools to survive. Food, water, and medicine are always low. There are also luxuries to be found, such as cigarettes and alcohol, which take a lot of resources to make, but can be great tools for trading.
Stop being sick, Bruno! Get it together!
This War of Mine is reminiscent of games like Papers, Please, where you will be asked to make hard choices regularly during gameplay, and they are not easy choices. You don’t have enough food, who gets to eat? Who do you use medicine on? If you have a limited number of beds, who gets to sleep on it? Do you give resources to the people who are healthy and scavenging at night, or do you try to get someone who is not in good shape back to health? Do you let someone join you? They might have skills, but do you want another mouth to feed? Can you trust them? The game doesn’t really judge you for making any choice here, nor does it give you a directive. It doesn’t even explicitly give you the choice. While it does have some random occurrences, most of the decisions happen naturally as a part of the situation of the game. This is specially true on the scavenging nighttime sessions.
Do you help your fellow man when it means another mouth to feed?
During the day you are stuck at home as you fear snipers will shoot you so the only time available for you to get all those supplies you are burning through so quickly is at night. You will send one of your people into a location and rummage through the ruins in hopes of finding what you need. Your scavengers are limited in what they can carry, and so you have to make tough decisions as to whether to bring back food, medicine, materials you need to build improvements to your shelter, or tools for survival.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t provide much by way of tutorials. This means that early on you’re often left simply guessing at how exactly the game works. One could argue this is intentional with the goal being to imitate the way someone feels as the war breaks out and their life is smashed into pieces and they have to make do. It could make for an interesting artistic statement, but I don’t think it’s one that should be made at the expense of the player experience.
Scavenging can be nerve wrecking.
You are not the only scavenger out there. Other groups of survivors are trying to survive as well, and you will eventually meet them. Scavenging segments utilize a stealth system reminiscent to Mark of the Ninja, where your moves generate sound which is graphically displayed as a ring. This lets you see how loud you are, and how far that sound carries. Likewise, noise generated by other people (or vermin) appears as a red circle in your screen when you cannot see that specific room. Other people are not always hostile, but you’ll have to consider carefully whether encountering them is worth the risk. This actually makes the scavenging more stressful, since you do not know if you should attack someone or not.
Making sure you are armed is important.
For example, at one point I found myself shamelessly looting a stranger’s house. I slowly snuck into their house and made my way to the kitchen, but as I was looting my food supplies, the occupant, an elderly woman caught me. She immediately ran off looking for help. I got all the food I could and immediately took off in the other direction. In another situation, I was looting a super market when a group of well armed survivors came through the door. There was nowhere to hide and I assumed I was screwed. My first instinct was to attack them, but I had a knife and they had AK-47’s, and while that approached had worked the night before, the odds were just too poor. So I unequipped my weapon, and went up them expecting the worst. I was surprised when their response was “Don’t worry, there is enough for everyone.” at that point I ran ahead of them and tried to get as much of the food and the good stuff as I could before they took it. The game never passes judgement on you for stealing from the elderly, taking advantage of the kindness of strangers, or stabbing someone of mysterious allegiances in the back. Rather, it lets you make those choice and deal with the consequences, which is sometimes a reward for doing a bad thing.
The things your survivors experience will take a toll in them. Wounds can become critical and cause permanent damage on the survivors, limiting their mobility and their effectiveness while scavenging. But damage is not only physical. Your survivor’s mental health will start deteriorating due to the dire situation, and sometimes in relation to the actions they must take in order to survive. This can lead to severe trauma that might affect your survivor’s ability to cope and can even culminate with them ending their own lives. As supplies dwindle, and the game moves into winter, you are guaranteed to make mistakes, and you will pay for those. The game auto saves, and once all your survivors are gone, you have no choice but to hope to learn from those mistakes during the next run.
Not everyone is hostile
This War Of Mine is a game that will put you in a bad situation and force you to make bad choices in the name of survival. Despite this, the tone is not as bleak as it sounds. 11 Bit Studios could have made a game where every other survivor is a monster, and everything is hostile. Instead they have created a game that is a great balance between the bleak situation and the hope the characters and the people around them can overcome the situation. In a way, that makes game more powerful than it could ever have been if everything was constantly hostile and negative. I would have liked a more robust tutorial, but if you are able to make it through the opening challenges you will find a narrative experience that is unique with every playthrough. If you liked games like last year’s Papers, Please, or survival rouge-likes like Don’t Starve, or if you even want to see a perspective of war that has been neglected in games, I recommend you check it out.
This review is based on retail code provided by the game’s publisher.
