Truce

Although war cannot always be avoided, there are times when it is carried out for no good reason, yet both sides insist on continuing just to avoid being the one to surrender. Granted, there are usually peace talks and negotiations before the violence starts, yet they rarely achieve anything. Hence, people are more likely to accept a peace offering after the war went on for a while.

Truce (official page) is a short game in which you get to witness two sides trying to find some common ground in order to put an end to the conflict between them. There’s not a lot of content to keep you busy, but there might be a lesson somewhere in there, which is just as good. You also cannot participate in the dialog, but there’s a bit of interaction later on in the game.

The two characters are named Terrace and Gerald, and they are fighting for quite some time because of a mine. As it happens, Gerald has attacked Terrace’s men after they started working in the mine, which caused the whole kerfuffle. Now, Gerald is asking for a truce, because the war is going nowhere anyway, and it would be better for both sides to just call it even.

While this dialog is going on, three people are digging a tunnel underneath the two men, with the purpose of planting a bomb under one of them. You are one of these people, and you also get to actively participate in the digging process. Granted, you only have to press the correct directional key when it is displayed, but it still feels like what you are doing is important somehow.

As far as the graphics are concerned, the game uses a minimalist visual style to render the environment and the characters, which are actually just colorful stick figures, or at least very close to it. Naturally, it doesn’t make too much of a difference anyway, because simplicity is the whole point of the game.

In the end, Truce probably won’t leave you speechless when you are done with it, but the lesson it tries to teach you is pretty much true. Hence, if you’ve got a few minutes to spare and you don’t mind the simple graphics, there’s no harm in giving the game a try.