14 DAY TRIAL // This War of Mine starts off with the characters having access to rather plentiful resources, even if it seems that their situation is dire, and from that moment on, gamers can expect each new day to be worse than the one that they have lived through (with very limited exceptions).
Sure there’s almost no food to eat and the medicine scrounged up from the starting location is very limited, but for a few days, it’s relatively easy to find necessities in the locations around, most of which do not pose any sort of pressing danger.
As This War of Mine progresses, it deploys its most effective dilemma: resources are available as long as the player is ready to do something entirely immoral to get access to it.
Early on (slight spoilers follow), a cottage which is relatively unaffected by the fighting opens up and gamers are pushed to explore it by a report which claims it has plentiful scavenging to offer and no dangerous people are around.
Once the player-selected character reaches that location, he meets an elderly couple that has medicine and food and plenty of other resources and cannot defend themselves when they are stolen.
At the same time, the woman is sick and the man is clearly unable to defend himself and his wife and cannot go out and replace anything the player steals.
Survival in This War of Mine is cruel and sad
I initially explored the place and noted the various available resources without stealing anything, thinking about how the other characters would react, and as the controlling force, how they would feel about my actions.
On one level, This War of Mine is just a video game and whatever negative feelings I have about taking stuff from people who cannot defend themselves need to be ignored in order to reach the survival objective.
At the same time, choosing to get what I need no matter the moral cost says something about me as a human being.
For a while, I avoided exploring the elderly couple’s home and focused on other locations, but as food got scarcer, I decided to go back there and pick whatever I needed, justifying my actions with the thought that someone else would do something similar sooner or later.
Neither me nor my characters felt good about that, but with the resources I got, I managed to survive for another couple of days.
I do not know if the trade was worth it.
