What makes This War of Mine particularly horrifying though is that it’s not abstraction. And it’s easy to abstract it-to look at it as a game, with virtual people doing virtual things. It’s a story about how far you’d go to survive. This isn’t a story of heroics, or valiant sacrifice. This isn’t Call of Duty or Battlefield or Medal of Honor. This War of Mine forces you to make choices I’m grateful I’ve never had to make in real life. I’ve had the luxury of growing up in the United States, and despite the fact we’ve been at war for more than half my life things have stayed pretty quiet at home. Or you could kill the poor guy in the garage and take all his stuff without fearing for your life. Because see, you could go infiltrate that military base for supplies, contending with an entire army of well-trained men with advanced weaponry. It’s at that point This War of Mine gets uncomfortable. The game opens more and more city locations each night though, and eventually you reach a point where all the empty areas are stripped bare of valuables and you’re forced into contact with others on a regular basis. Items range from utilitarian-the aforementioned stove, for instance-to morale-boosters like a guitar or a comfortable armchair. Wood, for instance, can be converted into boards for the windows, into beds, into fuel for a stove, into a rain-catcher, into a workbench, into an animal trap, et cetera. Supplies are then used to craft other, more advanced items, many of which are placed around your base. You’re shown a side view of your entire base, which is full of random supply caches to loot and debris to clear when you stumble upon it on Day 1-a valuable start to your survival effort. “Days” are spent playing what amounts to a post-apocalyptic version of The Sims. The game is split into a day/night cycle.

All you have to do is survive until it’s over. There’s a war going on and you control a group of civilians stranded in the middle of it, the city crumbling around you. This War of Mine gives you about a dozen days to retain your soul.

This war of mine game wikipedia