It might have something to say about the monotony of survival in wartime. How days blend together and hunger and fatigue are just the status quo. But I feel I might be giving this rather boring game benefit of the doubt, that it might just be a happy accident because a lot of what this game is trying to do just doesn't work.
At its heart, it's a survival game. It's resource management. Some light stealth and clumsy combat, but mostly resource management. Any and all human emotion, interaction, and spirit is or comes at the cost or benefit of resource. You scavenge for resources, build resources, trade for resources, so that you can keep your people (also resources) alive. It's all very gamified. I really tried to RP, but the options of interaction, discovery, and personal expression are so limited. I was shocked at the glibness of the dialogue, at the overbearing dollhouse-scavenge structure.
The game's made in central Europe, and is presumably about the Yugoslav wars, but it, its characters, its spaces, all seriously lack context. It could just as easily have been about the apocalypse or a natural disaster with little effort. I'm not going to pretend that this particular conflict is easy to make sense of, and I'm sure a lot of people were simply caught in the tide of it, but this game takes such an omnicient, expository view that I really wish it tried. It's almost acrobatic in its vagueries.
I thought a bit about Papers Please, a game also set in a fictional/unspecific Central/Eastern European state, a game where its mechanics were direct extensions of government policy, and its surprising, grim, and darkly humourous interactions with people directly expressed the cruelty of a regime and countries in crisis. This War of Mine is just the family (but really meters) you're trying to feed and keep warm with the actual toil of Papers Please. The worst part of Lucas Pope's game exaggerated.
At its heart, it's a survival game. It's resource management. Some light stealth and clumsy combat, but mostly resource management. Any and all human emotion, interaction, and spirit is or comes at the cost or benefit of resource. You scavenge for resources, build resources, trade for resources, so that you can keep your people (also resources) alive. It's all very gamified. I really tried to RP, but the options of interaction, discovery, and personal expression are so limited. I was shocked at the glibness of the dialogue, at the overbearing dollhouse-scavenge structure.
The game's made in central Europe, and is presumably about the Yugoslav wars, but it, its characters, its spaces, all seriously lack context. It could just as easily have been about the apocalypse or a natural disaster with little effort. I'm not going to pretend that this particular conflict is easy to make sense of, and I'm sure a lot of people were simply caught in the tide of it, but this game takes such an omnicient, expository view that I really wish it tried. It's almost acrobatic in its vagueries.
I thought a bit about Papers Please, a game also set in a fictional/unspecific Central/Eastern European state, a game where its mechanics were direct extensions of government policy, and its surprising, grim, and darkly humourous interactions with people directly expressed the cruelty of a regime and countries in crisis. This War of Mine is just the family (but really meters) you're trying to feed and keep warm with the actual toil of Papers Please. The worst part of Lucas Pope's game exaggerated.