Softsweater Games! - This War of Mine game review.

Monday 1 February 2016
Oh hi folks,

So me and my partner play quite a few video games, what's better than sitting next to someone playing an interactive story while you knit! It's like storytelling where you get to direct the story! For the most part at least.

So this game This War Of Mine.



It's set in wartimes. I actually hate war games, usually they're a bunch of dude-voices yelling and guns shelling and it's just a big bummer all around. This game isn't like that, you start off as a group of friends who have all unfortunately been homeless since the war hit. They find an abandoned house, which still has some walls intact and settle in.

The way the game mechanics work is that you have daytime and nighttime. During the day you tend your wounds with bandages, treat your sick friends with medicine and cook the veggies you find or the rats you catch. You can patch up the walls, you can build things to grow food, you can make moonshine. You know, all the ESSENTIALS for surviving a war.

In the evening you choose one of your crew to scavenge. And someone else to guard. The lucky leftover people get to sleep in the rickety beds you have to make during the day.

The first 18 nights we didn't encounter any assholes. Just lovely people who were actually offering up food and things to help us stay alive. A 'neighbour' brought us some veggies from their garden, later one of our crew helped them patch up their house a bit. It was mostly really lovely, eventually we met a homeless guy who needed food, but we hadn't brought any with us so we had to leave him. When we went back a couple of nights later he had passed away due to starvation. That was a bummer - but honest and realistic.

By night 19 we were struggling because one of our buddies had gotten stabbed when someone tried in the night to rob us. We didn't have any bandages and the place we chose to scavenge had an elderly couple in it. They were struggling to survive and the woman was sick.

We walked past them and took some bandages, and they didn't fight us. Because that's realistic. The man followed closely behind and begged us not to steal his wife's medicine.

Rough night, the game got a bit harder after then.

When the character that we were playing returned, everyone turned on him. They were disgusted that we had stolen medical supplies from an elderly couple. It's very honest to real life with everyone's thoughts and opinions coming into play.

And me and Thomas sat rationalizing it, but it made us think. What would we do if it weren't just a game?

We're on day 21 now and I can see that this game has a lot more to offer. The first five hours of gameplay were engaging, full of moral contradictions and lots of contemplation. We'll keep playing.

Well worth the $15.


Oh, and for the knitters, I am working my way through Part 1 of my #waitingforrainKAL! We started today if you're interested in joining pop over to my instagram account or my ravelry page to register!

2 comments:

  1. Awesome, I wanna try the game and knit the shawl!

    ReplyDelete

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