On the fourth night Pavle died. He was the runner, the man we sent out on scavenging missions late at night, to sneak around dark, half-ruined buildings hunting for scraps. Then I sent him to the school, where a group of wary folk with semi-automatic weapons were holed up, talking about fighting for freedom. I thought they might be friendly, that they might not mind if Pavle explored a little. I was wrong.
Going by the preview build, This War of Mine is going to be a beautiful game, and a very bleak one. It is an ambitious attempt to tell human stories of civilians trapped by war, attempting to survive in combat zones. You begin play in a ruined but habitable building with three civilians – not the same three each time, and it’s likely more will be added before the game comes out later this year – each one with their own skills and abilities. Pavle the runner might be joined by Katia, a former journalist with strong negotiation skills, or Bruno, whose skill at cooking means it takes less fuel to make a meal.
Those might sound like small benefits compared with combat capability or speed, but they are crucial. Resources in This War of Mine are not so much scarce as they are greatly in demand, with certain things absolutely vital for survival, and others for improving your home base, and anything that increases your bartering ability or reduces your resource consumption quickly becomes a cornerstone of your survival strategy.
The game follows a familiar pattern, in the footsteps of Con Artist Games’ The Last Stand, among many others. You strengthen your base during the day, taking the opportunity to eat, sleep, build and upgrade crafting stations if you have the resources, and deal with people knocking on your door. At night, you choose what each of your survivors do – scavenge, sleep, or guard your home – and guide your scavenger through a location, hunting for items, trading and, in Pavle’s case, getting shot in the back while desperately running for the exit. Not everyone you meet is friendly.
The beauty in the horror
It is a beautiful game to look at. The view is two-dimensional, with cutaway buildings for your characters to navigate, gorgeously rendered in monochrome. There’s a lot of attention paid to how you move through areas: an upturned sofa might provide a boost up to a higher floor where the ceiling is bombed out and collapsed; occasionally, you come across paintings still intact on the walls, furniture not obliterated. It is a realistic chaos. Elements out of your line of sight are obscured with a fog of war made up of delicate lines, and the only hints of colour are red orbs emanating from the sources of sound as you investigate a building, made by rats scurrying around – or people approaching.
The preview is not without its problems. There was no obvious way to save progress, which made the three crashes to desktop I experienced all the more infuriating – presumably the final game will allow you to keep your progress. Occasional moments when a character arbitrarily duplicated themselves or the oven stopped working were an annoyance, but not game-breakingly so. But the 12 days I played through were relatively clean, and felt complete, balanced and – perhaps I can’t stress this enough – beautiful to look at and absorb.
This War Of Mine is reminiscent of Papers, Please: it doesn’t want you to be so overwhelmed that you can’t go on, but it’s not trying to coddle you. It’s difficult but not punishing. Both games are set in a non-existent eastern European country, and both are pushing you to learn, through their systems, what it would be like to live in these oppressive environments. They both teach you how far you’d go to survive, where you’d draw a line; Papers, Please asks you to imprison innocents, for example, while This War forces you to decide between robbing an elderly couple and going home hungry.
Both games are engaging and entertaining enough to keep you on board despite the difficult subject matter. Both are, despite their bleakness, fun. (Fun is a strange word for this, I realise, but the English language lacks a better description for the way a game’s mechanics can be rewarding and engrossing.)
Polish developer 11 Bit Studios is trying to create something that leaves you with a lasting, emotional understanding of what warzone survival truly entails. It’s ambitious, but so far the ideals aren’t let down by the execution: it is aiming for a very, very difficult balance, and at least in the preview, is hitting it dead on. In the early game I’ve seen so far, the designers have built something in which it’s possible to survive, but only just – you have to plan carefully and trade well, use the game’s systems to your advantage, stop exploring, limit your ambitions to surviving the next day, scavenging what you know you can find.
You have to be lucky, too, but survival isn’t impossible even after a setback or two. After Pavle died – carrying the biggest haul of scrap and wood I’d yet found, materials I was planning to put towards a herb garden – my game didn’t end. Bruno and Katia, crippled with sadness, had nights where they found it hard to sleep, but they found a little hope in the meagre home comforts they managed to scavenge between them. It was possible, just about, to get through the next few nights with only two people, and eventually we found enough materials to scrape by.
We never did manage to build the garden, but we did OK without it. We didn’t prosper, but we did survive.
This War of Mine is released on PC and Mac this winter. Tablet and smartphone versions may follow.
