When the zombie apocalypse hits, I won’t be leading a band of rugged survivors. I’ll be hanging out and reading books until my contacts dry out, then I’ll get eaten. There’d be booze, there’d be sex (with JILL, my right hand), and there’d be panic. It’s probably because of this realization that I enjoy becoming a video game hero (or antihero, maaan). In my cubicle, I can only dream of stealing from rich assholes, but in video games, I can make a living doing just that.
But every once in awhile, I like to be reminded just how terrible everything is. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, it’s oddly refreshing when someone reminds me about how real life actually works. So when I played 11 bit studios’ This War of Mine, I was overcome with sadness. The good kind of the sadness. The kind you get after reading 1984. The kind you get after realizing that everything you know is a lie. The liberating sort of sadness.
In This War of Mine, you don’t play as a soldier or a sniper. You’re not a general, you’re not a cyborg. Hell, you’re not even one person. You control a lonely group of survivors trying to scrape by in a war-torn city. The game is very loosely based off of the Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. It works, because everything feels damp and gray - much like what your Red Scare era history teacher told you about Eastern Europe.
You don’t engage in any set-piece battles, there aren’t any lone-wolf running and gunning missions. You avoid gunfire because if one of your characters dies, you’ll die for good. Your other characters will fall into a depression for a few days. The handful of cigarettes and booze you just looted from an abandoned monastery won’t cheer them up like it used to. If you don’t figure out how to lift their spirits up, your group can go into a death spiral. They’ll stop eating, they won’t want to get out of bed. This actually happened during my first playthrough, one of my characters just up and walked off. He couldn’t take it anymore.
Okay okay, so this game is actually fun. Resource gathering, survival, bartering - it’s legitimately entertaining. It’s like if your favorite point-and-click game from the 90’s grew up and went away to college, got a degree in depressing history, and now has a drinking problem. The constant spectre of death and sadness that looms over you while you play forces you out of the happy-go-lucky trance a lot of pop video games try to lull you into. Even in some darker games, you still play as a nigh-invincible superman. I never thought it would be this fun to play as a normal, squishy human.
When I think about “realism” in video games, my mind drifts to impenetrable flight simulators, but that isn’t actually realism. Those games try to be factual and challenging. They don’t convey any more meaning than your run-of-the-mill FPS. Even though the world isn’t controlled by a guy behind his computer screen clicking on items for you to pick up, This War of Mine more closely resembles reality than any other game I’ve played. So if melancholy is your bag, you should give it a try.
