“There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”

— Ben Franklin.

I’ve seen a lot of feedback on This War of Mine (BUY), and it sounded like a mixed bag, so I decided to give this a shot and see what it was like for myself. I headed over to AMAZON and picked it up…a day later I was off and running.

After one playthrough we were HOOKED! This game offers something that NO OTHER game around does! Can it be challenging…YES! Does it present a story…YES!! Does it present deep dilemnas…YES!!! Will this game challenge your morals/ethics…ABSOLUTELY!! It all revolves around the Book of Scripts, the place you’ll be guided to in almost every excursion you go on. Does this all add up to a fun experience…YOU BET…BUT I can honestly say its not going to be a ‘sit around the table and laugh’ type of good time. TWoM is a fun game because of the challenges it presents, and the decision making you have to go through in order to make it to the end. You WILL lose more than you win, and you will most certainly ask yourself…’am i doing the right thing?’ and these two things are what makes you come back for more!

Many have said this game is a downer because of the story it tells…an attempt to survive in a wartorn city under siege…presenting the characters with very harsh circumstances and choices…do you keep your little bit of food and let the starving elderly person go without, or do you give up your food and then face the risk of starving yourself? There are no right or wrong choices in this game…just consequences for every choice you make. This is something other games don’t often sucede at…conveying that everything in life is a matter of choices…and with those choices come consequences…for better or worse. And in this game the decisions you make will completely MAKE or BREAK your end results.

So with all that said…in the end this is still a game…meant to present you with a challenge and make you think…(perhaps contemplate deeper questions revolving around conflicts)…but certainly not to spoil your evening…not to necessarily be depressing. At the end of the day you can pack it up and put it away and reflect on the experience…’boy, maybe i should have pushed my luck searching for water’, ‘I can’t believe what happened to that other group of survivors!’, or ‘should we have sent two people out scavenging so we could bring more stuff back…jeesh, but then EVERYONE is exhausted because nobody got any sleep’.

Its a game set in a war…like so many other war game you’ve played…but now your ‘dudes on a map’ are more realistic people…you tend to care about these three surivivors more than the plastic dudes you push around the map in other war themed games like RISK/KEMET/CYCLADES etc… The big difference is that in TWoM your select crew of survivors seem more important…you want to see ALL of them survive…nobody is going to be the sacrificial lamb so to speak. I find that fun…fun in a deeper way…I want to win, but winning isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal here…you’re building a story with your characters, and you begin to build relationships with these survivors.

I’ll end this review with the story of my three survivors…Pavil (the former soccer pro), Katia (the former journalist), and Marin (the former garage worker). We only lasted the first chapter…this is their story:

For the first two days of our survival we worked hard clearing out the rubble in the building…searching for food, water and items we could use to make useable things with (ie a rain collector or a deadfall trap). It was a rough first couple days, but we made it…Marin even got to have his morning coffee those first couple of days. We got super lucky when Pavil ran into a thug and managed wrestle his assault rifle away from him…life was looking bright…food, water, and a weapon to defend ourselves with! But things got tougher after day two….the food dwindled and the constant need for water forced us to leave our protective home and venture out to the area streets. We needed a filter to finish off the rain collector so we sent out Pavil and Katia to see what they could find in nearby buildings. It went well…they came back with a nice butcher knife to help us defend ourselves with, and they traded some sugar and herbs for some other usefull items. We made it to day 4, and decided that Marin needed to head out with Katia that night so that Pavil could do the guard duty with the assault rifle he had claimed for himself. They headed to a distant apartment complex to see what they could get. At this point we knew that Katia had been complaining about how hard things were, and she had been secretly writing a lot in her journal the last day or so…we really should have seen the signs of what she was about to do. Marin and Katia managed to get into the building and while rummaging around came across some other survivors in worse shape than us. They begged for food but we didn’t have any to trade or donate. The fact that we couldn’t help these poor people hit Katia hard…she seemed to withdraw even more…not speaking at all to Marin. But Marin knew time was of the essence…they needed to get what they could get and head home before the sun came up and the streets became a sniper’s heaven once again. So he searched some other rooms in the building to take…maybe he could find something to help the people they had discovered. But he wasn’t carefull enough and dropped his candle…catching the curtains on fire…the old building went up in flames quickly…he was trapped…he couldn’t get out! Katia never saw him exit the building…

Pavil was still back at home..guarding for intruders…and the hours slipped by quickly while he waited for the others to return. Minutes turned to hours, hours into morning….no sign. Pavil quickly realized that they weren’t coming back! Reality began to set in, and he knew that without the supplies they were to bring back he would be in bigger trouble than he was prepared for. He looked around the house for any other items he could possibly use, and in Katia’s napsack he found her journal…she had been writing about how she just wanted to get away from all of this…no matter the risk. He pieced things together as best he could….she must have found an opportunity to slip away to a safer place through the darkness…maybe even taking Marin with her. Pavil never found out the true fate of Marin. Now it was up to Pavil to find others to help him make it….he would never last to the end of this siege without help…

In hindsight maybe we shouldn’t have pushed our luck to find more goods in that apartment building, choices have consequences. This game is truly an experience worth taking!