This War Of Mine is deliberately stripped back, a war game without battles, a survival game without zombies. You control a handful of civilians just trying to stay alive while a fictional but familiar modern conflict destroys the city around them. By day, the group stays in the dilapidated building that’s now home. Through a side-on dollhouse view, you direct them to make improvements: a stove, a bed, a radio to provide both news and music to play over the sounds of gunfire. You can’t queue actions like in The Sims, and directing multiple people at once is difficult, but often there won’t be much to do but watch and wait, or fast-forward to night.
At night, you can send one person to scavenge nearby buildings while the others sleep or guard the base. Each building marked on the map has a list of what you can expect to find there, both good and bad. You’ll direct your scavenger through another dollhouse, with those rooms out of their eye line blurred out. They can rummage through containers and piles of rubble to fill up their backpack, and whether it counts as looting or stealing depends on who else is there. Some are willing to trade, but others should be avoided. Or killed.
It’s typical resource management: food, bandages, fuel. The people are also resources, as each has a particular skill, like bartering or crafting from fewer ingredients, so some can feel more valuable than others. A touch of randomness means that the buildings available to scavenge, neighbours who come asking for help, and people who ask to join your group might be different on your next play.
Also important is mood. Help others and your people will be content and make optimistic quips. If someone dies, they’ll become depressed and perform actions more slowly. If they reach broken, you won’t be able to direct them at all and you’ll need to have the others bring them food and try to talk them out of it. Leave them home alone and you may return to find they’ve killed themselves.
Unfortunately, the writing – from dialogue to diary-style updates to notes discovered while scavenging – is poor, but the game’s message comes through well enough in the systems. Knowing that survival is a matter of finding the right formula gives you just enough hope that it’s even more crushing when your plan for success slowly crumbles.
The slow pace can make it less tempting to try again right away with a different tactic, but perhaps that’s for the best. When on day 30 the radio says that international aid is on its way in a fortnight’s time, but your people are starving, sick, and broken, you realise that in some situations two weeks can feel like forever. And real people living through modern conflict don’t get to just start over.
Related Articles