Is it a good idea for games to be deliberatly not fun in order to convey a message, or to tell an effective story? I think so, but unfortunately most this DLC mostly fails in this regard.

If you choose to play with a child in your group your game will be harder, they obviously cannot help with most activities in the base and they fill up a slot an adult could be filling. This isnt neccesarily bad but unfortunately the way This War of Mine is structured means there is very little plot progession, every few days there is a little bit of text in a characters bio with some more backstory, and at the end depending on your actions we find out what happened to them after the war. This is fine in the base game, the more interesting story is told through gameplay with what you do with the strangers you meet and how you manage your resources, so it was never a problem.

However when playing with a child in your group you will be significantly more frustrated for the sake of the small drip feed story that plays out almost entirely through text boxes, and it's not like this is giving a different message from the base game, war is hell, and obviously it effects children more than adults, there didn't need to be children in the game for this message to come across

The game needed some kind of addition to add replay value but sadly this was not it, if anything I have less desire to play the game again but with children. What the game needed was to be deeper mechanically, the base game was mostly fine in terms of narrative. And also the base game was already close to being misery porn and adding children into the mix only makes it even more over the top. However I do appreciate the added locations and the ability to teach the children certain taks is interesting (but it would be better if there were more tasks to actually do)