This War of Mine initially makes a strong impression - survivors fending for their lives, foraging supplies, food, and even staving off attackers not in a zombie scenario or post-apocalyptic hellscape, but in a realistic civil war in the fictional country of Pogoren. I don't believe such a scenario had been tackled before, at least not as famously, as in this game, so I was immediately interested. At first, the game had me entirely hooked, I was playing multiple multi-hour sessions at a time, and despite some initial troubles, I got into the swing of things pretty quickly. Managing my characters was fun and challenging at first. However, as time went on, I ended up realizing how shallow the game truly was both mechanically and thematically. Although the game attempts to show the true horrors of the civilian perspective of war, you don't see a whole lot and the moral choices you have to make end up losing their emotional effect pretty quickly. As it turns out, the mechanically advantageous choices are all the immoral ones, and on repeat attempts, there's practically no reason to go for anything else other than some self-imposed limitation. The game is, unfortunately, lacking in variety: the trader always has the same supplies, multiple runs will have the same areas to scavenge with no differences (there is some variance, but largely it's the same areas), you'll always have a cold front or a crime wave, et cetera. Once you've played maybe, six attempts, you've seen it all, and the game doesn't offer much more. The stealth, combat, and scavenging mechanics are all fairly basic and offer little depth. Even when it comes to the anti-war themes the game tries to push, it can't help but feel unbelievably surface-level and spoonfed to the player. The worldbuilding memos the player finds are too impersonal, and the character interactions are so threadbare that it becomes difficult to care.

At least the presentation isn't bad, the game is clearly low-budget but it has at times fairly striking art direction. The grim, almost monochrome, paper sketch style fits the tone very well and at the very least makes the game look as grim as it wishes it was. Asset quality is fairly low, but when compared to how pulled back the camera is, this is hard to notice even at high resolutions. Environments are surprisingly detailed and seem to tell better stories than the actual writing does. My only real complaint is the lack of anti-aliasing, which can make the game look overly cheap at points. The soundtrack is well-produced and can be suitably atmospheric, but I can't help but feel it's too overbearing and "epic" sounding for the kind of intimate stories this game wants to tell.

This War of Mine clearly has fans, but I didn't want to see the entire game through. While it was quite addictive at first, the simplicity of the gameplay and themes did not grab my attention for more than 15 hours. At least the art style is kind of nice.