This War of Mine [official site] developers 11 Bit Studios recently announced their next game, Frostpunk, but they weren’t quite done with This War. To celebrate the Sims-y survival game’s impending birthday (it’s Monday), they’ve launched a new free content update. Expect a new ending, new NPCs, and more as your rag-tag group of civilians try to survive in the warzone. That’s a cheery little end to this laff riot of a week. Read the rest of this entry »
This War of Mine developers 11 Bit Studios are returning with another grim survival scenario to ponder how much we’re willing to give up our humanity etc. This War of Mine’s modern-day-ish setting was inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo, with regular people trying to get by in a war-torn city, but 11 Bit are going a bit more unreal with their next. Today they announced Frostpunk [official site], set in a frozen world with steam-powered technology. I’ll tell you one thing about morality in this hard world: I’ll devour the first nobber I see wearing a top hat with goggles.
This War of Mine’s [official site] take on resource gathering and survival leans heavily on its setting – a besieged city caught up in the horrors of a modern war – and The Little Ones expansion, now available on PC, Mac and Linux, turns the screw by adding new playable characters and NPCs. They’re the titular little ones. Children. You might start the game as a parent, or find children hiding from danger, alone, or have them approach your shelter looking for safety and security. Once you’ve taken them in, you’ll not only have to protect them from harm, you’ll have to make an effort to understand the world through their eyes.
Long before they spawned a SWAT FPS spin-off, Sierra’s Police Quest games were big on police procedure, often with deadly consequences if you didn’t play by the book. Beat Cop [official site], an adventure game announced today and due to launch at the end of this year, may let players write tickets and tow cars but… I wouldn’t get your hopes up for obsessive procedure. Inspired by ’80s cop shows (not the most formal, that lot), Beat Cop is about a former detective framed for murder and busted down to a beat, trying to clear his name. Might be an interesting one, this.
This War Of Mine [official site] is a sobering experience. Like most of us, I’ve never been involved in an actual war, thus any knowledge I have regarding the atrocities of conflict has been accrued from modern media. This War Of Mine may be a fictional, video game take on these realities, but its Sims’-esque slant on war zone resource management delivers something which, at the very least, feels real from a position of relative ignorance.
Update 1.4, named “New Beginning”, adds Steam Workshop support, meaning players can now share the scenarios they invent in the game’s editor suite.
RPS Feature The Grims
There are several ways conflict-from-the-civilian-perspective effort This War Of Mine could have gone. Maudlin, shoegazing dialogue piece; inappropriate And One Shall Rise hero saga; icy-hearted death toll calculator like Plague Inc or DEFCON. What I didn’t expect was The Sims During Wartime.
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What a left turn This War of Mine is. 11 bit studios previously made the markedly un-serious Anomaly games, festivals of tactical explosions, air-strikes and all the other hoo-rah wargasms we’re generally exposed to. A sombre survival game exploring the vulnerability of civilians trapped in warzones wasn’t where I would have pegged them to go next.
These twists on the formula are where I’m finding my interest in survival games peaking. As Pip pointed out in her interview with senior writer Pawel Miechowski, it’s taking what zombies have long been a metaphor for and going literal. Now 11 bit have announced we’ll get to be war-torn on November 14th and thrown a trailer into the mix as well.
