This War of Mine: Odds and Ends


This is the third and final article on This War of Mine. After completing three playthroughs in three weeks, recording my initial thoughts, and scripting a dramatized account of my second playthrough, this article will discuss two aspects of the game: difficulty, along with a number of silly and serious oddities.

Oddities:

My survivors live in a bombed out city, with no running water (we have to purify rain water), no stove (until they construct one, which requires wood to burn), and no lights, but we store raw meat in the fridge and it never goes bad?

Food seems to be impervious to time in This War of Mine. It's more likely to be stolen than to decay. I once kept a pot of cooked food on the stove for a week in sixty degree weather, and it was as edible and filling as the day it was made.

On the topic of food, I've wondered about the animal traps. What sort of animals are crawling around down there, and how long would trapped meat stay fresh? I've always needed the food too desperately to let it sit, so I've never discovered the answer.

Injuries and death are common, and it's better if it happens to the other guy. But characters react to death in wildly divergent ways. Pavle, the football player, killed one person with a knife and he descended through all three levels of depression: sad, depressed, broken. Roman, the professional soldier, attacked an army outpost. He knifed the guard, took his weapon and then shot five. He was smiling the next day.

Being raided is an unpleasant experience. It's made even worse when the raiders wound the survivors who stayed overnight. A survivor could receive near fatal wounds, but never fatal ones. Never did a survivor die in a raid. The raiders are too kind.

An interesting bug/feature. The game saves at the conclusion of the nightly scavenging. Upon returning home the game informs the player if the house was raided. If it was, the player can quit, and reload. I tried it a number of times and I found the effects of the raid would change. But there only seemed to be two possible outcomes each night. They varied in what was taken, and any injuries upon survivors, but the raid always happened.

Considering the vast amounts of weapons, appliances, medicines, tools, and cigarettes one can craft, it seems a little odd there is no craftable clothes. Winter arrives half way through the game, and a nice jacket would be excellent for the chill.

These four people are living in a giant building. It would be easier to heat and defend a smaller one. They certainly don't need the space. More than half the rooms are empty.

There are a number of scavenging locations where the character can exit on the opposite side they entered from. Why can't they chose which side to enter from?

And finally, whenever a character finds a locked door, a speech bubble appears above their head which says, “I have a tool to open this,” even though they don't!

Difficulty:

This War of Mine so challenging, a player needs to be willing to commit to loses quite a few scenarios before having any chance of success.

The first reason: limited resources. The game is difficult because every night the scavenger has a limited inventory. They can only bring back so much stuff, and it's never enough. Especially wood. Inventory slots allow for stacks, eight of water, four of raw food, twenty bullets, or two wood. The amount a character can carry is very small for game-play purposes, yet unrealistically massive compared to reality. A recommendation I read online said, aside from necessary items (food), always take valuable objects, instead of crafting pieces such as wood and components. Trade the valuables for whatever you need.

It's a good idea, except I felt I was always in need.

This leads into the second problem: What to craft? The game doesn't offer any helpful hints, and since resources are scarce, building the wrong appliance the first turn can be the cause of death five or twenty turns in. Built a radio the first playthrough. Never again. You need resources to build beds, animal traps, tool station, crowbar, knife, stove.... etc. Even building the right item or appliance at the wrong time is incredibly punishing. A heater is essential, but not till winter arrives twenty to thirty turns in. Appliances and workstations need to be built in the right order to allow characters to survive the current challenges, while progressing towards further improvement.

As I said, the game punishes mistakes brutally. A small mistake, a character dies, and when one character dies this chain reaction follows:.

  1. They didn't bring back anything from their scavenging, so a night is wasted. Maybe the house was already short on food or really needed some medicine.
  2. The character was probably carrying a valuable tool like an axe, knife, crowbar, or gun. It needs to be recovered, but the area's dangerous!
  3. The characters at the house become sad, because their friend died. If something isn't done they could slip into depression. They're probably also hungry, sick, tired, or don't have a weapon to defend with.
  4. If there was three characters, now there's two. And two is impossible to work with. One person needs to scavenge every night, otherwise they'll starve, and one person needs to guard against raiders, otherwise they'll suffer injury and theft. But if there's two people, no one ever sleeps. Until one night they both sleep need to sleep. Then there's no one scavenging and they're both seriously wounded in a raid!
  5. Everyone dies.

Raids are uncommon early, but by day five it felt like raiders were attacking every other night. By day ten it was every night. Thankfully, around day twenty the military came through and cleaned out the streets, reducing the raiding. Waking up wounded is a serious setback, but defending every night, spending precious bullets, and praying for the raiders to not return is terrifying.

The scavenging phase is not without danger as well. The best stocked locations are controlled by armed thugs, rebels, or the army. They have guns, armor, and excellent defenses. Even less combative locations can end in death. It only takes one guy with a knife surprising your guy with a knife. Winning a knife fight isn't much better, as the will character need expensive medical treatment.

This War of Mine is deadliest though at a distance.

Combat is lethal in a melee, but guns are instant death. One shot will kill the weaker survivors, and the controls can be confusing for returning fire. I lost a character because I clicked in the direction of the target. But you have to click on the target. One survivor dead, the whole house dead.

Though walking stealthily around locations is supposed to allow the player to avoid combat it seemed as if sometimes a person in the building would sense me anyways. They'd yell and run to my location. Running away doesn't help when someone has a shotgun.

While these could be viewed as complaints, their purpose is to explain, this game is gloriously, nail bitingly arduous. The difficulty is a combination of intentional factors which need to be learned by multiple playthroughs (which items to build), punishing resource and health systems, and unintentional injuries due to a lack of tutorial or explanation about how to play the game.

It's a tough game, but in spite of that, I would recommend it. It's tough to survive in a war zone, but viewed as a story of life and death in the chaos it truly becomes a war you can own.

This War of Mine Series:

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