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Jan 27th, 2016 at 00:54:06 - This War of Mine (Other) |
So quickly, I decided to try this game on Android rather than on PC (which I think everyone else is using), just to have a different perspective on the game.
Let me give a quick summary of gameplay. The player has control of three characters from the outset of the game. Characters may be scrolled through or directly selected to complete actions. With a character selected, the player may interact with various objects within the game space. Some objects may be directly used from the beginning, and others have restrictions/limitations based on the material that the player possesses. Characters possess certain traits -- such as carrying capacity, unique skills (cooking, bartering), health and physical characteristics, emotional states, and so forth -- which impact their ability to perform certain actions. The primary game objective is simply to survive for some uncertain amount of time without dying of malnutrition, illness, exhaustion, or physical violence. The game has a decidedly dark and dreary aesthetic, although not something that is unpleasant to view. The characters and environment appear hand-drawn or painted, and the animations for their behaviors are simple yet complete.
Ok, so for my first play-through, the game took a little bit of adjustment to understand. The interface wasn't entirely intuitive at the beginning, so I definitely made some silly mistakes. Some of the character traits made sense automatically (good cook, for instance), whereas others don't really have a clear meaning (smoker?). During my play session, this character trait didn't appear to have any impact on the game ... I even found a cigarette, but there doesn't appear to be a way to use it.
The game follows a loop in which the player has control of all of the characters during the daytime -- trying to produce enough material to keep all of the characters in good condition -- and into nighttime, when the player may opt to send a character into the surrounding area to scavenge for more resources. I admit that I restarted the game at the end of the first night upon realizing that I had effectively squandered the day acquainting myself to the interface and the importance of various objects within the sanctuary. And I also definitely quit after the second night as well, when one of my characters was mortally wounded during a scavenging operation. I will talk about each of these experiences at greater length, but it is important to note that both of these outcomes taught a punishing lesson.
The first lesson was the importance of selecting what to build and prioritize. At the end of the first day, I had upgraded the workshop needlessly, leaving me in dire straits once I realized how hard it would be to recover more resources in the outside world. There wasn't a lot of clarity to how much each character could actually carry and recover in scavenging missions, but I soon discovered the truth: not much. I could tell then that food and sleep were very important things to attend to, and I hadn't prioritized them very well. The game simply let me make the mistakes without much of a tutorial, and I quickly felt the consequences of my errors.
After restarting the game, on my second night, I sent one of my characters to a new scavenging location that had been unlocked. At this point, I had recognized the need to prioritize food and somewhat rare resources. However, I hadn't yet run into any unfriendly NPCs. Well, this was the night that I would. I unfortunately found myself detected by another NPC, who ran away. Brazenly, I continued to loot the area. A couple seconds later, two characters ran down the stairs with knives and proceeded to beat my character to the edge of death. After that, I had had enough for my first day. I am pretty sure that I was being punished for stealing, although I thought I might be confronted non-violently to begin. Instead, I was brutally punished, again paying the price of my actions.
So far, the game appears to follow a fairly consequentialist ethical structure, with mistakes being represented by diminishing stats and potentially death. We will see where this goes in future sessions ...
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