What evil lurks in the hearts of men.
They are hungry. The refridgerator is long since empty. Marko is a good scavenger but lately he has had bad luck. There was a confrontation last night, at the supermarket. Men with guns. Marko escaped with his life but that is all. No salvage, no food.
Pavle has not slept and is showing signs of starvation. He is tired and depressed and requires constant encouragement from the house’s livelier inhabitants merely to continue living.
He won’t last much longer. If his hunger doesn’t consume him his demons will. And the rest of the group will breathe a silent, guilty sigh of relief as they mourn his loss.
This War of Mine is a bit like The Sims: they’re both home management simulators. But whereas The Sims is set in a consumerist utopia where food, water, and electricity are in plentiful supply, This War of Mine takes place in a shell-blasted Eastern European shithole where people routinely kill each other over scraps of horseflesh. Both games are about meeting the needs of the little housemates/survivors under your control, but in This War of Mine the needs are more primal and immediate and much more likely to remain unfulfilled.
The game is divided into days, each consisting of a day and night cycle. Snipers make it impossible/suicidal to leave the house during the daylight hours, so it’s during this period that the housemates spend their time crafting items and improving their meagre circumstances. Using supplies like wood, mechanical parts, and electrical components, it’s possible to construct basic furniture, tools, and weapons to aid your survival effort. Beyond a few gift caches in your house, supplies must be obtained either by salvaging or trading with our survivors.
Salvaging missions take place at night in a variety of depressing locales and involve gathering as many suppliues as you can carry without getting yourself killed in the process. As the game progresses necessity drives you to take larger risks: eventually you’ll run into other survivors, and they probably won’t be the generous type. But you’re desperate, remember? And desperate people sometimes do desperate things.
The genius of This War of Mine is that it never makes your options explicit, it never reduces morality to a menu choice. Instead of being all “Do you want to kill the old lady and steal her food Y/N?” moral dilemmas arise naturally out of interactions between the game’s various systems and story tableaux.
Like Papers, Please, to which it is frequently and justly compared, This War of Mine is not always an enjoyable experience. There are long periods, like when you’re waiting for a merchant, when you’ll literally do nothing at all, and these can be hard to endure – especially in combination with the game’s bleak tone. But then who said war was a picnic? DAN STAINES