The game that makes Limbo look like a veritable funfair
They say war is hell. 11 bit studios is determined to prove it’s even worse, by creating a game from the civilians’ perspective. You’re running a shelter of innocents just trying to live out the conflict. Find food, provide heat, keep them safe and, please, won’t you think of the children? It’s a heavy subject to tackle, but the developer is confident it’s found a new way to show the horrors of war. “We knew that most importantly we need to have this atmosphere,” explains art director, Przemysław Marszał. “We thought about this game as a novel.
It’s not one-to-one realistic, but when you read it, when you’re playing it, you should immerse in this game and you should see yourself there. If this game would be too realistic, or on the other side, too simplistic, there would be problems with this connection that you are the civilian.”
Realistically depicting a warzone means the tricks we’ve learnt in other survival games are of no use here. Hoarding is useless, as getting raided is a constant (in nine in-game days, we were raided three times). Bad enough when all the food and fuel has been stolen, it’s awful when people get hurt. We returned one time to find that Lydia, the young girl in our care, had been slightly wounded in the crossfire of a raid. We felt terrible, more so when we discovered that the photo for Lydia is the daughter of one of the developers. Who was watching us play the game. Er… sorry about that. “We decided that, first of all, we’d use real photos and real scans of characters,” explains Marszał. “Only people from our team, friends, neighbours. Just casual, normal people.” It’s a nastily effective choice, making these feel like real people you’re letting down.
To stop raids, you have to build barricades and weapons. You build beds to let the civilians rest and stoves so you can cook hot meals, but everything is in limited supply – and deciding who gets to eat and who doesn’t is the hardest early decision to stomach. There’s almost never enough food, reminding us of a similar dilemma in The Walking Dead. But Telltale’s game was never so cruel that it had you deciding who goes hungry every single day, or made you responsible for replenishing that food supply in the first place.
Because when night falls, you have to choose who sleeps, who guards the shelter and who risks their life venturing out to scavenge. Gas stations, hospitals and the like contain vital resources such as food and medicine (hopefully) but they may also be full of bandits (hopefully not). Going out unarmed is just below ‘slicing off your ears so you never have to hear Uptown Funk again’ in the Big Book of Bad Ideas, but scavenging is restricted by a very limited amount of inventory slots. You’d be safer with a weapon, but that’ll mean fewer potential resources that you can carry home.
We explored a church, where it quickly became apparent that armed bandits were everywhere. Combat is clumsy, deliberately so (these are civilians, not soldiers), and character deaths are permanent. We should’ve fled. But that would mean 24 more hours of watching our people starve. Desperation stops you thinking straight. We rooted through cupboards, praying for little more than a sole tin of food, knowing being caught could result in us being shot dead any second. Death would almost be a mercy, compared to the shame of returning home empty-handed.
Another day passes, and we need resources more than ever. Luckily, the next house we search is a goldmine, with nothing standing in our way but an innocent old couple. They’re incapable of fighting back, so there’s nothing stopping us from taking all they have. An immoral choice, that not even the dev team could bring itself to do, explains senior writer Pawel Miechowski. “I didn’t steal from those guys. Designers had to because they need to test stuff like this, but [a] few guys from the team, until now, didn’t steal. Not even once.”
Well, we stole. We took it all. Please don’t judge, we had mouths to feed. Them or us, right? R… right? Guilt isn’t just getting to us, it can crush your survivors’ spirits, leaving them depressed for days if you broke bad to keep everyone fed. Get down from your high horse, reader – if we’d left the old couple alone, it’d be another day at least that our young ward goes without a meal. Not an easy decision.
If you’re thinking that this all sounds relentlessly bleak, that’s because it is. But for Xbox One, This War of Mine adds what was severely lacking from the acclaimed PC version: hope, in the form of The Little Ones. “We didn’t want it to just be an added feature,” says Marszał on bringing children to the game. “We knew that the topic is so important that we needed a lot of time to solve it. You should really feel those are kids, not just gameplay characters.”
“We want to portray the special bond between the parent and the kid,” agrees lead designer Maciej Sulecki. “Or if there are no parents, between other adult characters. So we want to portray the kids in the game in the way they act during the real war. We did research about the kids in the war, and I think that the main idea was to make another layer of emotional connection.”
And after another night of fruitless scavenging, a child greeting you happily at the door makes a nice change from ‘we got raided again’. Playing hopscotch beats playing steal-the-food-from-the-elderly, and you can even make toys for the kids. That swing set is the first thing getting flung in the fireplace when we’re out of fuel, mind.
Sending all your survivors to bed with their stomachs full, condition healthy and mood content is rare, making it all the more satisfying when it is achieved. The addition of optimistic children makes the bitter journey to that goal easier to swallow. We’ve always wanted to see the end of the conflict in This War of Mine, and with The Little Ones, we might finally have something worth fighting for. Tom Stone