This War of Mine

...all I can say is that this game left a bad feeling in me. I left before the war ended, but I had family that stayed in Sarajevo throughout, so I can safely say that I know what actually went down. This game didn't leave me feeling sad because of the atmosphere or story, rather, it left me feeling angry, and here's why. This game felt wrong, it felt like it was made by someone who only saw the war in the news, and then used Hollywood movies to fill in the blanks to create a "compelling narrative". To me, this game trivializes the war, and uses it to sell a "realistic war-time" game to people who have never experienced an actual war. Millenials born in America will play this game, and get the completely wrong idea, even though I don't think the devs were maliciously trying to revise history. Honestly, they should have just created a completely fictional war, in a fictional country, and left it at that. Perhaps I am biased, but they used "Sarajevo", and going through this game was like listening to someone try to tell you how your own house looks, except they just change everything and anything at their whim. I tried giving the game a chance (on Steam), playing through it, but this is not what Sarajevo was. In terms of fiction, the story is serviceable. In terms of mechanics/gameplay, I didn't find it compelling.

Glitches, nonsensical crafting, unfinished writing, permanent death, no save feature, a lack of realism, preaching to the player, and unbelievable quirks ruin the game. Examples/explanations: --Glitches: [1a.] Good glitch: Want to keep your stuff safe from raiders? Don't loot one of the cabinets in your base. As long as something stays in it at all times, you can use it to hide your stuff. [1b.] Bad glitch: If you board up your base entirely, it sometimes won't register that you did. --Nonsensical Crafting: [2.] Finding things to barricade doors and windows wouldn't be difficult: they'd litter the ground. It's a city full of ruined, wooden buildings and furniture. The effort you have to go through to collect them often seems unrealistic, and it cheapens the gritty feel of the game. --Unfinished Writing: [3.] Donating medical supplies to the hospital deletes them from your inventory, but does little else. Donating doesn't appear in the what-you-did slideshow at the end, etc. --Permanent Death and No Save Feature [4.] The game auto-saves when a night is done, and if a night-time raid fails due to a character death. Since there are many glitches/issues in the game, this is an irritating problem. --Preaching to the Player [5.] Characters disdain violent actions, and monologue text about how bad they are. --Unbelievable Quirks/Lack of Realism [6a.] Addictions depress characters if you don't indulge them. [6b.] Item weight isn't considered. For example, 10 inventory slots could = 20 pieces of lumber or 100 sugar cubes. (The sugar cubes would weigh about 0.66lbs total. The lumber would obviously be heavier/cumbersome.) [6c.] If a character becomes "broken", they're unplayable and unable to move due to depression. Shortly, they'll flee, robbing the group and leaving them to die. The person will somehow do this even if too sick/weak to flee. The sudden betrayal makes no sense: they gave up on life, but then they're motivated to survive at the cost of everyone else?

The game sets a great tone and atmosphere, conveying the feeling of hopelessness and loss, surviving and success. Often leaving you in situations where you have to make tough decisions which both you and your characters have to live with, characters you may like or hate and have to keep alive. Though it goes downhill steadily in execution, some of the gameplay mechanics are far to contrived, it is often not clear on when you are making you character do something that could get them kill in situations it clearly should tell you. Unfortunately due to the game being pretty inconsistent it's hard to even say if many of the problems are very poor design or just huge bugs that have been overlooked. Due to it's flaws, regardless of if they're preposterous design or blatant bugs, the result is you will often go through a lot to keep your characters alive only to have them killed off due to the flaws in the game rather than any fault of your own. When this happens, the game wears thin quickly. In it's current form I would give it 5/10, if the bugs/bad design are corrected it could go up to 7/10. Currently the game spoils to much of it's positives.

I really, really wanted to like this game. The narration is excellent, the concept profound. The execution of the actual game is extremely interesting. Why I leave such a low score is a combination of two factors: 1. Merciless saving such that you can only play one adventure at a time, and you only save at the END of game day, which can take anywhere from from two-twenty minutes (full day and full night scavenging) in real time. 2. The *(#$ing crashes at the very end of the game day (especially near crime wave) which wipe out all your progress for real frustration. I think I have lost a third of my time playing due to such crashes, and reinforces the most monotonous aspects of the game. The developer is quite aware from both this forum and Steam about the game's poor stability, and it's been out for years. I no longer believe in the Quality Assurance department, and I doubt I'll buy another one of their games again. Yes, I bought this at full price but just got around to playing it.

I have a love/hate relationship with the no-save feature. It can work when the cost of failure is relatively small. For example, in Hollow Knight dying means you respawn, go find your corpse, fight your own ghost and upon defeating him get your wallet back. (Unless you don't mind re-starting broke) Usually takes under 5 minutes. In FTL you restart the campaign, but the whole campaign takes something like an hour to finish. In Hotline Miami you restart the chapter and an average chapter takes 2 minutes to complete. In XCOM and Darkest Dungeon you loose your soldier(s), but continue playing while leveling up the new ones. In all those games I didn't mind loosing because I would learn something and almost immediately go apply what I learned. Try, try, try again. In This War of Mine, I failed because I didn't figure out exactly how the combat mechanics work. So I started again, played the same lumber-shuttling simulator on repeat, gave the same 2 hackneyed youths 2 bottles of medicine for their mother, produced the same 15 bottles of moonshine for sale and went to face bandits, this time armed with a hatchet, a helmet and a firm intention to backstab everyone into oblivion (thanks online wiki). Only to stumble on a different part of combat mechanics and die ingloriously. I do feel like taking a stab at those bandits again. (No pun intended) But I cannot be bothered to spend another 3 hours to get there. To run around every location five times to collect all the lumber again, to brew all that moonshine again... and if I hear 2 hungry youths say "our tummies hurt" again, I'll punch them and repurpose their tummies for fertiliser.