It was hard not to be intrigued by This War of Mine‘s tagline when I first heard it. “In war, not everyone is a soldier.” It’s something I’ve only ever thought of in passing while playing most shooters, although given how often civilian deaths have been used in games to increase drama, I’m surprised no one ever thought to look into it until now. 11 Bit Studios has done a lot of research and work to create a survival game based on wartime life for non-combatants, making a survival game that is both difficult and hard on the heart.
The PAX East build tasked me with keeping a couple of survivors alive in a bombed-out ruin of a building. The game plays in 2D, with the camera drawn out so you can see a great deal of the building all at once as well as the characters wandering in it. Each person had their own skills, with each being best suited for specific tasks like building, cooking, scavenging, and things like that. The game’s main objective is to see how long you can survive, so you’re going to want to know these skills soon.
During daytime, players need to be improving their living space and taking care of problems. On the first day, I only had enough equipment to build a bed, a water filtration unit, and some cooking equipment. I wasn’t lucky enough to start out in a place with filters for said filtration unit or any food to cook with, so that meant people were hungry and thirsty fast. The game randomizes what you can find, and as it progresses, everything becomes that much harder to find as the war and other survivors claim all the useful stuff. Given that each character has an array of needs that have to be met, luck becomes more and more important in finding what you need.
You’re not just stuck scavenging the same location over and over. At night, you can send someone out, preferably a good scavenger, to look in another location for goods. In these locations, you have a more limited view, but can still see quite a bit of the buildings. Things are grayed out where your character wouldn’t logically be able to see them, so you need to be careful. There are often other survivors in these places, ones who might not appreciate losing their stuff to a stranger. You can choose to interact with them if you like, possibly making some friends who will trade you the goods you need. You might also get in a fight you can’t win with better armed survivors, losing a precious character in the process. Hopefully you sent your character out with a loaded gun. If you did that, though, then maybe you’d want to attack the other civilians first and get the drop on them. Why trade when you can just take their things, right?
Each character has a picture attached to their profile, one of a real person that the devs took a picture of. It gives the game this sense of reality when you’re thinking about whether you want to put a bullet in someone over a can of beans. As items get harder to find, the desire to take what you need through force is only going to grow, making players feel a bit of what it would be like to go through hard times like these. If you want to get far in this game, you’ll be forced to make these kinds of decisions and live with them.
It’s dark subject matter, but yet another deep look into something many might not think about. It forced me to reflect on civilians in wartime in ways I hadn’t thought of before, and was a bleak look at that kind of life. It’s a hard game with a difficult message, but I think players owe it to themselves to take a look at what it has to say. From a position of goofing off at a thousand dollar computer, it can be hard to see the awful lives that some people around the world live in every single day. Hopefully seeing this, even in the form of a game, will make some people more aware of the horrors in the world around them. It certainly made me think.
