This War of Mine

10 hours in review: I hate this game.
I am a completionist. I mostly play RPGs and strategy games. I like to win, so my gaming style primarily involves achieving goals, expanding my powerbase, meeting my targets, improving my strength, all of which to end in a smashing victory.
This War of Mine offers very little and frequently none of these things. The gameplay is inherently simple. You have a few survivors in a badly damaged house. During the day they can do simple tasks, like building furniture, patching a hole in the wall or something else to help you survive, cooking meals, distilling hooch, or resting from nightly activities. During the night one person can go out to scavenge for badly needed supplies, while the rest sleeps (hopefully in a bed) or stands guard, hoping you won't get raided during the night.
Rather than adding and expanding, the game constantly offers straightforward but difficult choices. Does the scavenger bring home raw materials today so somebody can patch a hole in the wall, or does he bring medication in case somebody gets sick or wounded? Do I risk life and limb to steal from armed bandits or inflict myself with moral guilt stealing from the defenseless elderly? Do I give my last piece of food to the wounded guy who has to stand guard tonight or to the sick man on the bed? Do I trade away my last bandages while nobody's wounded so we can all eat tomorrow? There's no do-overs either so I am stuck with my choices. Beyond just restarting the entire story of course.
This is what makes This War of Mine so damn good.
Every day in the game, it's one bad choice or another, all for the sake of staving off immediate disaster. For one more day. For the sake of survival. For the hope that things will be a little bit better tomorrow, if only you can get through the problems right now. Can you survive without resorting to theft? If you can't, who do you steal from, how much do you risk in the process? What about murder, when does that get justified by survival?
If as a player you do not get upset by stealing or murdering for the sake of your group of survivors, then your survivors will. They get sad and depressed, even suicidal, from committing atrocities. Morale is an important part of the game, and the horrorific actions you commit to in the name of surviving are as relevant as the ones that are inflicted upon you. Maybe even moreso.
Because war is horrible and this glimpse of what living in a warzone is like, just so. It is atrocious. It is insecure. It comes with the realization that while this game has plenty abstractions, these stories are real. There are people who have lived through this. Who are trying to live through it in the world today. Who probably will be trying to live through it in the future.
Who only want to survive. Just one more day. Maybe tomorrow will be better.
I have to stop writing now. Marko is sick, but he's the only one who is uninjured after last night when bandits tried to raid our shelter again. We have some rat meat left over so I'd best cook him a meal. Maybe he'll finally find some medicine tonight. Hopefully the trader will come by today, we have a few bottles of moonshine ready. If not, I might drink it. All of it. Who am I kidding. Tomorrow won't be better. Things will only get worse.

"War is hell"
This game is not about a soldier who destroyes the whole army.
This game is not about a massive cool looking war.
This game is about people like you and me,surviving in hell named war.
Atmoshepre of this game is soo outstanding,that you can feel the pain that war brings upon characters
Also this game gonna make you cry like a bitch when someone from your crew dies.
This game shows you real war,without censorship
It is highly depressing,but i still recommend to buy it.
It is a highly unique experience and if you are sick of games where war is a one man murdering an army,play this,it will be worth it

This War Of Mine is an emotional, intense, and challengeing experience as you observe and control the actions of various surviving civilians in the center of a war torn city. I've played a few hours of this game, but decided that I would share my most recent experience, in which I ended up dying trying to save a young girl from getting raped...:
It was the third day of this living hell. I was staying with an old highschool friend who I just happened to run into after the city went to shit. After scavanging an old abandoned house the first two days and gathering gathering us enough food for the next few nights, I decided to head to the supermarket under the cover of dark. I creeped in through the entrance and heard the faint sound of shifting rubble behind a closed door. I slowly approached the door, being very careful not to make much noice. As I got down on one knee and peeked through the keyhole, my heart jumped. Not two feet ahead was a large, military-clad man weilding an ak-47 assault rifle. In front of him a young girl was sifting through some rubble, and mumbling about food.
"What is that you're looking for, sweetheart?" the man asked.
"Please... food. I need food"
"Hey, I've got food. All the food you need. Maybe I can trade you some for a favor?"
"I... I... don't think so"
"We can dine together, then have some fun"
"I... better be going home now"
As she begins to walk away, he runs up behind her yelling "get back here bitch!" and smacks her across the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking her to the ground.
"Get up now! Or I will shoot you!"
Wimpering, she crawls to her feet and he escorts her out the back of the supermarket with the rifle in her back. After making sure the coast was clear, I carefully opened the door, and proceeded to loot the main store isle for any food and supplies I could find. After filling my backpack to its full capacity, I began my walk back towards the entrance when I heard loud crying coming from the back of the store. Being a curious fellow, I decided to investigate. Outside the back of the store, there is a small shed with a large sheet metal door. I press my ears up to the large door, and I can hear lots of shuffling and crying. My heart sinks as I realize what's happening. This poor girl is about to get raped.
I had to make a decision at this point. Do I leave with my supplies and live another day, or do I attempt to liberate this young woman? Without skipping a beat, I drew my crowbar and began prying open the sheet metal door. Finally, after what felt like forever, the door gave way and I finally saw what was unfolding.
Making eye contact with me, the girl screams "Please! Help me!"
To which the man immediatly turns and sprays my chest full of lead.
As I lie dying, gasping my final breaths, I see the girl climb up onto some broken carts and jump over the fence. She had escaped. As I fade into darkness, I smile: knowing that that girl will go on to live another day.
A Screenshot Of My Final Moments
Emotional, Exciting, Realistic, Horrific. 10/10

Like many others probably did, I picked this game up for cheap during a sale and then forgot about it for a long time until I happened upon it again while looking for a new game to play. One thing I can say right now is that if you're interested in this game or just need something new to play for a little while, play this. Right now.
The game itself is based on a pretty simple concept(survive and thrive) split into two rotating phases - day and night. During the day you make food, build new things, have your survivors interact with each other, and deal with ailments or wounds. Nighttime is where you decide wether you want to send out one of your survivors to scavenge, guard the shelter, or sleep. Typically scavenging is the most fruitful option, as it's your main source of many of the important resources needed to create your nescessities. It's also the most gameplay-rich part of the game as you have both a time-limit and an inventory limit to consider. You will sometimes, however, have to adapt to the situation you're in and either stay put, or take a risk and scavenge in a potentially dangerous location.
For me this is the greatest strength of the game. It's quite difficult, and it's VERY punishing if you make a mistake, while also being greatly rewarding if you do something right. The first few playthroughs or attempts, you're quite likely to end up in at least a couple of bad situations, to which the solution might require some pretty big risks or sacrifices. As you play more though, you learn to avoid putting yourself in unnescessary danger as well as preparing for critical in-game events such as winter. The game does rely quite a lot on early-game decisions which can be excessively punishing when you first start out(ex. I barely survived my first playthrough without knowing how to create upgrade items), but again this is something you'll learn quite fast.
The game does lack a bit of replay value though. Every time you either succeed or fail with a new group of survivors, you'll unlock a couple of new ones, which does add a bit of variation. Locations do also have a chance of changing it up a bit in terms of inhabitants and loot, but after your first 3 or 4 runs you'll have mostly seen it all. Once you know how to deal with the different situations as well as how to accomplish your goals, there's very little challenge left in the game unless you go out of your way to assault a military establishment with nothing but a shovel. I squeezed out almost 50 hours of this game and loved every moment of it, but there are easily a lot of things that could've been done to add more content.
+
Incredible atmosphere
Amazing soundtrack
Challenging
Good writing and variation in characters
-
Lacks replayability
Little variation in in-game events

Overview:
This War of Mine is a strategic, tactical, point & click 2D-sidescroller with traits of life-sim, but it practices a different theme compared to other war games. The title is developed and published by polish devs 11 bit studios. It's a game that doesn’t look at either military side of a war, it looks at what's in the middle – innocent victims caught amidst somebody else’s conflict. It’s available on Steam, the App Store and Google Play Store.
Story:
The story in This War of Mine changes every time you begin a new campaign. The player begins with a group of people who have shelter, some food and some tools; after that the game plays out day by day, and it’s the player's task to manage resources and make the characters survive as long as they possibly can. They’re in the middle of a city used as a battleground for a war in an eastern-European country.
A campaign that I went through:
Day 1: I begin with Marin, Katia, and Arica in an abandoned building. Arica sneaks, Katia bargains, and Marin builds. Each of them have personal backstories. The first day everyone searches through the building. Arica leaves to scavenge a gas station. Marin and Katia stay and guard. Arica gets food, components, fuel, and herbs.
Day 2: All three are tired and hungry; Arica and Katia eat, Marin makes two beds. Arica and Katia sleep, Marin builds a Workshop, a heater, then eats. Arica goes out, Marin sleeps, Katia guards. Arica goesto the gas station.
Day 3: The shelter was raided, Marin is slightly wounded, but they stole nothing. Arica and Katia sleep, Marin builds an Herbal Workshop, Metal Workshop, makes a knife. Arica wakes up, eats. Marin and Katia eat and guard. Arica goes to the gas station. She finds a soldier harassing a girl. Arica uses her knife to fight the soldier and kills him, he severely wounded Arica. The girl is saved. Arica keeps the man's gun.
Day 4: Arica is severely wounded. Marin is sick. Katia bargains with someone. Despite lack of food, fuel, and Arica's wounds, all three are content. Arica stays and sleeps, Marin guards, Katia goes out to a supermarket. She sees someone but gets by unnoticed. On her way out she bumps into and kills him out of fear.
Day 5: Arica is severely injured, Marin is sicker, Katia is now sad. Food is low, fuel is high. Marin and Katia sleep. Katia goes out with a gun in hand. She goes to the military outpost. When trading doesn’t work, she shoots and kills one, severely wounds another, and gets killed.
Day 6: Katia is dead, Marin is sick, and Arica is severely wounded. No food, little fuel, gun was lost. Arica goes out, Marin stays to sleep. She moves slowly at a nearby church already robbed. As a last ditch effort to bring back medicine for Marin she kills three men, robs them. On her way back and another thief appears claiming to be friendly. He shoots Arica and she dies.
Day 7: Everything has gone to shit. Marin was raided and is now severely ill and wounded. He has no food, no fuel, and is depressed. He can’t even go out to scavenge.
Day 8: Marin is terminally ill. He sleeps all day in bed.
Day 9: Marin is dead.
I didn’t make it.
Gameplay:
Find supplies: food/consumables, crafting materials, electronics, weapons, valuables, etc. To do that you must leave the shelter and look for it in houses, schools, hospitals, and churches, among other city structures. There is a Day & Night system at play: During the day your characters are forced to stay inside because of snipers which prey on people out in the open; inside they can eat, build, rest, smoke, talk to each other, etc... Traders, beggars, and people looking for shelter will knock on the door often, it’s something that might kill you or help you live another day, you could ignore it; it’s also how one can acquire more characters, or just another mouth to feed. During the night your characters can sleep, guard the shelter, or go out scavenging. Since you have more than one character, each can do something different. However, bandits can and will raid your shelter during the night while you’re scavenging, and you won’t know this happened until the beginning of the next day. Characters can get different conditions of varying levels: Hunger (still hungry, hungry, very hungry, starving, extremely starving), Fatigue (tired, very tired, and exhausted), Emotion (content, normal, sad, depressed, and broken), and Health (slightly sick, sick, severely ill, terminally ill, slightly wounded, wounded, severely wounded, lethally wounded). And some other states that I’m likely forgetting about.
The thrilling gameplay takes place mainly while one or more of the characters is out scavenging for supplies. Technically anything goes, but there are always consequences. Anything out of the line of sight will be blurry or foggy (like past a door, or on a higher floor). Entering an owned property will require sneaking; walking is silent, but running causes noise. There are some hiding places to hide from other survivors. If they hear any noise you made or spot you in their line of sight they will check it out, but they might give up thinking it’s a rat, as they make some noise when scurrying around too. You can hear steps and they are visible on-screen, it might be a person or a rat. If it’s a person and you are revealed to them it will trigger different events, either a fight or a discussion on whether to trade, or maybe extortion. This is where trust is tested.
If a character has gone through different experiences, like helping out a neighbor pull his family out of rubble, the morale of the group will change, they might become content; if a character kills someone during a night of scavenging, the opposite will happen, when a character reaches the state of ‘broken’, they will not have the will to eat, sleep, or even move – they’ll have given up on life - and might escape the shelter (disappear) or commit suicide.
Visual:
2.5D is was you would call this game, since it’s built in 3D but is viewed from the side. You can zoom-in just enough to see the detail in the environments and the characters. The HUD is clear and though sometimes there might be a lot of icons on the screen, it never feels too in-your-face. Animations are for sure the biggest plus that this game has in graphics, the animations are amazing; from simple knocks on the door to grabbing someone from behind, throwing them on the ground, and stabbing them to death. The art style doesn’t chase realism very much, but it isn’t stylized by any means; it’s the perfect blend of semi-realism and atmospheric feel.
Sound:
This game has got the environmental sounds among silence completely nailed. Sounds like making food, opening and closing doors, all the way to the way stabs sound, it is simply superb.
Final Thoughts:
It never lets you win. You either finish a campaign completely dissatisfied or you finish a campaign with the vaguest feeling on dissatisfactory satisfaction. For those who crave a challenging resource management mechanic, this game should scratch that itch mighty well.
You might do things in this game that will surely surprise you, things you wouldn’t expect yourself to even think about doing, but you can do it because it’s simply a game; how nice it is to sit in your cozy chair in your cozy house and experience this awful world, without ramifications; makes you think about things, doesn’t it?
The game is an unforgiving and emotionally wrenching experience that shows how psychopathic human nature can be once humanity is pushed back to primal environments. It's made to reflect the realities of living in a war-torn city.

Not a First Person Shooter, not a survival tycoon, but an experience . The distinction is essential to the purpose of the game since without it, it is merely another FPS/survival game. I personally refunded a few crappy games to purchase this and I did not regret my decision one bit. If the game induces empathy and melancholy then congratulations, you played this correctly.
The story of the game is based on the 1994 Balkans Conflict, particularly during the Siege of Sarajevo which lasted at least a year before broken and relief was sent to the people although in the game, the war would last around 30-60 days depending on the character set you start with.
Regarding the characters, barring one (Roman) they are civilians with different qualities, emotions, stories and strengths and you unlock more of their background story as the game progresses. You build your shelter in the day, you scavenge for supplies in the night.
The key to enjoying this game is not winning. Its surviving and as I've mentioned above, empathizing with the soldiers, civilians, even the thieves.

Marko had spent last night scoping the place out. He clutched his pistol tightly with a pair of sweaty plams. This was it. Slowly, he edged towards the door and out of the rain, opening it with a gentle sigh from the hinges. It was dingy inside; the gloom was heavy. Taking slow steps forwards he made his way to the next door.
Knelling down and looking through the grimy keyhole, he saw no one. Good, he thought to himself. Nudging the door open with his pistol, the hooded survivor krept down the hall. Footsteps! Quickly hiding in the gloom of an alcove, he held his breath tightly as a young woman walked past.
Some part of him was screaming in anguish over the moral dilema. It's not right, the voice spoke to him. His conscience needed to be suffed, and he ignored it as the door closed. The woman was inside the kitchen. He just needed to wait, and-
"Emil!" she screamed suddenly. Marko bit his lip as she locked eyes with him, only to run upstairs. Grasping the weapon as his breathing became hard, the young man ran through the open kitchen door, slid down the ladder, and burst into the basement. Turning and looking for a place to hide, he wanted to cry. There was nowhere.
"Not here," came a strong masculine voice from above. Markos slowly turned to face the door, his eyes shaking in their sockets. Some bloke in a blue shirt ran into the room, holding a knife high. "Bandit!" Marko was up against the wall. He couldn't hold the pistol properly because his hands were shaking so hard.
Two shots burst through the gloom. One hit the man square in the chest, the other in his knee. Although wounded he charged, stabbing Marko twice as they grappled for freedom. Life and death. Markos raised his pistol to fire and...
...He missed.
He died before he could realize the folly, falling limp with a soft plod as the knife sunk into his neck. Marko had been a hero, always willing to brave danger to feed his fellow survivors, always volunteering to scavange, and never letting anyone go hungry. He'd been a hero.
Pavle realized his best friend was dead the moment he didn't come back. He was distraught. Waiting by the door all day, sitting on the floor and listening for hours. The young sports star had only eaten once, and his face was grim.
"I'm sure he's just la-" began Bruce.
Pavle sucked his breath in sharply, cutting Bruce off. "No," he said slowly. "Marko is never late. Ever since this started he was always back on time." Taking a knife from the floor besides him, Pavle looked Bruce in the eye. They knew it had to be done.
It was raining again. The journey to the house had been uneventful, and Pavle knew roughly what was up, thanks to Marko's work two nights before. Slowly but surely he crept into the dark building, illuminated only by the blinking lights and fire. Creeping into the kitchen the football player could see food. He was glad. Sliding down the ladder and turning around, however, his mood plumeted.
There lay Marko; his corpse pale in the darkness. Blood was all across the floor and up the back wall, with the body slumped slightly against it. His face was frozen in time, eyes wide in fear. Pavle was... calm. He knew what he need to do now.
Going back up the ladder and shunting the kitchen door open, with no regard for stealth, he charged up the stairs. Up and up he went, his breathing becoming savage as he reached the very top floor. Pavle heard groaning and the moving of objects, but he didn't care, bursting through the door he stared a bandaged and bloody man in the eyes.
"No... you can't!" cried a female voice behind him. Running forwards with his knife in hand, Pavle screamed as tears streamed down his angry face. The blade sunk deep into the wounded man, killing him instantly. Turning to face the woman, and watching her run out of the room, Pavle ran after her.
She was too slow, and his blade was very sharp. Her body fell limp about as fast as he used to score a goal. Checking both their bodies with no respect, the sports star cursed. They had nothing on them.
When he got back to the safehouse, Pavle was covered in blood. Alica asked him what happened, but Bruce merely handed him a drink. Placing the knife off to one side, Pavle just sat down, and wept. They had killed his best friend... and he had killed them.
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EDIT: Complaints and whatnot, decided to do a little proper review down here.
This War of Mine is powerful because of how it handles itself. There's an overtone of helplessness and regret, characters lamenting over their uselessness. Often when someone dies, they'll hope the next one isn't them.
Marko is dead.
Those three words gave off more emotion than every other war game I've played. I didn't need to twoniner my foxtrot, I wasn't "getting my ass" down to 'bravo point', there wasn't some black hawk down, and my 'LZ' wasn't 'too hot'. I didn't even have to press to pay respects.
Marko is dead. I just saw these three words as my screen faded to black. Then I was back at camp, and the others knew something was up.
I can't really express how profound that was. Perhaps because of how subtle the game was, the moment it outright told me someone was dead, then moved on... maybe that's why it was so powerful.
This War of Mine allows you to build characters up. It's literally an open book and it'll allow you to draw as many conclusions as you want. Because of that, I feel, it was made much more personal. Let me explain: I'm a writer, see? I write characters, get attatched to them, and sometimes watch them die. I'm constantly close to my own creations.
I feel like this game lets everyone else do that, too. If you want to make your own characters with it, that's totally fine, and it will let you. If not? That's still fine, because the game tells you enough on its own to invest you regardless.
I'm kind of rambling here, so I'll end this edit thus: This was not the game I wanted, this was the game I needed.
Also the DLC is garbage sadly. Hopefully their new game is better.