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This War of Mine does a fantastic job of achieving exactly what it sets out to do. It’s definitely one of the best games I’ve played this year in terms of resonating emotionally and nailing a theme through both mechanics and narrative. It sort of makes me want to do an end-of-year top ten list. Hmmmm…

Script below the jump.

Let me start this video with a story. Katia was a reporter who came back to her native city of Pogoren when war broke out, hoping to cover the story and check up on her parents. Unfortunately she was too late - by the time she arrived her parents had gone missing and Pogoren itself had crumbled to ruins. Stranded, she found herself teamed up with two men, Bruno and Pavle, to survive the siege. For a week they stayed together, struggling to eek out a life in a run down home with no food and no running water. Eventually a woman came to the door and was desperate for help - men were threatening her and her daughter and they needed help boarding up their home for safety. Over Bruno’s protestations, Katia went out that night to help strangers in need. One morning the group met Arica, a young cat burglar looking for shelter. Katia welcomed her in. But just when it felt like their little family was growing, Pavle died getting supplies. That hit the group hard, and even Arica was saddened by the loss. A few days later the woman with the daughter returned - this time pleading for someone to stand guard against a group of men who were threatening to sexually assault her and her daughter. Again, Katia stepped up and volunteered, if only to get her mind off of Pavle’s death. And again she returned unharmed, proud that she would not let this war break her. Later that week Bruno died. Arica and Katia fell into deep depression and occasionally fought. It fell on Katia to scavenge for supplies, especially after Arica was seriously wounded in a raid on the camp. One night in a supermarket, Katia witnessed a soldier trying to rape a woman looking for some food. As ever, Katia did what she thought was right. But this time she paid for it with her life. The next night Arica went to the same supermarket to pay her respects. Arica found Katia’s diary and brought it back to the camp. Alone, Arica wouldn’t survive many more days - but the diary would eventually make it into Katia’s parents’ hands and would become a bestselling account of the war.

Phew. I have to love a game that can generate narratives like that. This War of Mine’s approach to narrative generation is interesting - it’s one part The Walking Dead and one part The Sims. That is to say, like The Walking Dead characters come pre-baked with personalities that you can observe by reading their personal bios that get updated as events unfold around them. And like The Walking Dead, a fair bit of the game is scripted. Different scavenging locations have one or two possible events you can encounter - for example, there’s a garage where a son is taking care of his sick father and is desperate for medicinal supplies. And the choices in these scripted situations end up being really state based - you can trade medical supplies with the family or you can turn around and ignore them. But like The Sims there’s a strong procedural element at play. Maybe you don’t help the father and son because your own party members are sick and need the medicine. Maybe you help them because you witnessed some terrible stuff last night and need to feel good about people again. Maybe you watch aghast as the son pleads for medicine but simply have none to give, and leave empty handed wondering if the father will be okay. All of these are valid outcomes of the game. But systems-wise this encounter only has two real outcomes - you give the guy medicine or you don’t. What makes This War of Mine special is that it makes the narrative context for why you helped or why you didn’t help matter just as important as whether you helped. Suddenly these binary choices become far more complicated when there are a million selfish reasons to help and a million noble reasons to walk away.

The gameplay itself sits somewhere between The Sims and Don’t Starve. You manage several civilian survivors of the war in Pogoren. During the day you build up your camp and try to keep spirits up by feeding people, letting those who had guard or scavenger duty rest up, having conversations with other survivors, and generally expending your resources to stay as healthy and as happy as you can. At night each survivor can do one of three things - they get rest with sleep, they can stand guard to protect the stash, or they can go out to scavenge for more resources. Rest can help sickness and wounds and exhaustion, but you need supplies and you never know if you’ll be raided. If one follows Sid Meier’s definition of a game as a series of interesting choices, this is the gamiest game of all - even deciding who goes to bed is a daily debate about weighing risk.

It is at its heart a survival title, and like many of those you will fail a lot before you win. But where Don’t Starve and other survival games’ are about seeing how far you can go, This War of Mine is more about the journey than the destination. It cares about the stories it generates more than something as trivial as “winning.” Dwarf Fortress’s mantra may be that “losing is fun”, but really I’m not too keen on that saying. First because, you know, “Fun!”, but also because it masks a more important lesson on display both there and in This War of Mine. These games don’t suggest that the act of losing is fun, but that some games create possibility spaces where outcomes that don’t result in victory can still result in accepted or satisfactory experiences. So maybe not “losing is fun!” but “losing is valid.” It’s an embrace of the whole possibility space that I really respect - where other games pretend their loss states don’t happen, games like This War of Mine insist that not only do they happen they need to be respected. To me, to cast aside lose states in this game would be to insult Katia’s sacrifice.

This War of Mine keeps a bit of distance between the player and what’s going on onscreen. You can only zoom in so much, and even at its closest the game keeps you far removed from your survivors. On one hand, being so far back from the action removes a lot of the humanity from these characters. We get a much stronger sense of who they are through their little photo and biography updates than we do through what’s happening in game. When something good or bad happens it happens to little pixel people who all have the same animations and heights and it’s hard not to escape the feeling that it’s a bit of a puppet show. But that same lack of detail forces us to imagine these characters to get a better view of them. That depressed conversation between Arica and Katia that caused them to fight might just be two low poly models and a text box, but in my head it was as powerful as anything in The Last of Us. I knew they were talking about Pavle and Bruno and whether it was any use helping anyone in this situation even if the game didn’t make that explicit.

And that’s the other great trick of the game - it plants the seeds of empathy but you need to fill in the cracks yourself. If you’re looking for a rich, textured world dripping with lore about the backstory of the war and who these characters are, you won’t find it here. Instead it gives nominal notions about characters and invites you to commit to caring about them, to make them real for yourself rather than have them be fully voice acted mocapped people that you just observe. In The Walking Dead or The Last of Us, characters exist mostly on screen - our choices are the only opportunity we get to express who we think they are. In This War of Mine the characters exist in your head just as much if not more than on the screen, and it gives you a real connection with them. The game wants to create a story with the player, and that means some of the story comes from the game but a lot of it has to come from you. Not just your gameplay choices but how much you commit to role playing and caring about these characters. You can play with a cynical min/max approach to survive until the end of the war, but that robs the game of much of what makes it worthwhile.

In the end I don’t know if this is really an anti-war game so much as it is a game that tries to get us to think about the horror of war in a context that we don’t normally consider. It doesn’t get into the politics of the conflict, or whether the war is noble or not, or whether either side is worth supporting. The war isn’t incidental, but it is treated as a now-immutable fact of life. The war just is, and the important thing isn’t to condemn politicians or support the troops but for survivors to find hope for themselves. The game doesn’t rage against war itself, it rages against the suffering it causes. It wants us to recognize that among its many terrible costs is the disruption to civilian life. It’s a perspective too often buried by tales of valor and ideals and the narratives of those fighting. But it’s a perspective that needs to be seen; to be (in however inconsequential a way video games and provide it) experienced. And luckily that perspective gets told here with confidence, compassion, and deft hand.