'This War of Mine' Hands-On: Collateral Damage
A video game about war is not a new idea. But in "This War of Mine," you don't play a soldier, hero, or warrior. Instead, you control a group of civilians trapped in a war-torn city, trying to find the food, medicine and supplies they need to stay alive.
"This War of Mine" is scheduled for release some time this year on Steam and GamesRepublic for Windows, Mac and Linux computers, with plans for a mobile version after that. We checked out an early demo of the game at the recent PAX East video game convention in Boston, Mass., and were already impressed with its harsh examination of the other side of war.
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On its surface, "This War of Mine" by Warsaw, Poland-based 11 Bit Studios looks like a lot of other games. It's a side-scrolling point-and-click game with a realism-focused art style that often evokes pencil sketches with its strong lines and gray palette.
But "This War of Mine" isn't fun — at least, not in the way other combat games try to be. The three characters all have a short bio with the story of how they got here. One helped his family get away and then lingered too long. One is a journalist who came back to find her parents. One is a former soldier who defected after being ordered to shoot civilians.
Players spend their nights scavenging a generic city that could be anywhere. By day, they are holed up in a house, building items like a makeshift crowbar or a water filtration system and trying to catch enough sleep to get through the next night.
Each action takes a certain amount of time within the game. Cooking a meal might take an hour in game time, for example, though for players it's only a few seconds. When night falls, it's time to decide who will scavenge, who will sleep, and who will stand guard.
There's never enough food. There's never enough time to sleep. And if you want something like a weapon or a bottle of medicine, you'd better have something worthwhile to trade for it.
The days all pass like this, each numbered. When we asked how long the final game would be, writer and designer Pawel Miechowski declined to answer, pointing out that in war, there's no way of knowing how long it will last. He wants players of "This War of Mine" to have the same feeling.
Miechowski told us the idea for "This War of Mine" first came to him when he read an interview with a survivor of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. "This War of Mine" is loosely based on that devastating conflict, but 11 Bit Studios intentionally didn't specify a country or time period.
"The message of 'This War of Mine' is that it could happen in your city, in your country, and you would struggle for survival. That's what people do when war breaks out. It doesn't matter where it happens," Miechowski told us.
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