This War of Mine Retrospective

I first discovered this game when it was released in 2014 and I didn't get to it for a few months because it looked really jarring and I was not prepared for what this game was going to bring to me.

The aspect of This War of Mine is like follows: Imagine you're playing Call of Duty or another first person shooter and you have all these elements going on around you. When you're playing Call of Duty, you're shooting at the enemy, you're going to the adjectives, you're listening in your earpiece, to your commanding officer. But what a lot of people don't realize is that when there is a war going on that there are other people involved besides the soldiers and the commanders and the two or three warring sides.

In this game, you deal with the people, the civilians, dealing with the war going on and the conflict and the soldiers. When it was first released, you only had a few people to choose from but you would choose a civilian and you would be hunkered down with someone else in this bombed out building. From there, you would loot the building that you are in but then eventually you would run out of supplies. So, what you would have to do is go out in the night because there was fighting during the day. It’s too dangerous to go out during the day because you might get shot; that is the harsh truth of war, you have to sneak around at night to get supplies.

In your “adventures”, you would find other survivors of the war and sometimes you can trade with them, sometimes you can talk to them, and unfortunately other times you need to fight for survival. When I played the game, of course you have to assess what's going on. After I had used all the supplies that was in the bombed out building that my civilians took shelter in, then I would have one person sleeping at night while the other person went out to get supplies. You had to be careful because you needed food, but you also needed rest and it affected your health if you didn't get any of that.

It was really jarring for me as living in a first world country and never having experienced combat or war or strife or struggle in my entire life. There would be different places like a hospital or a church where people took refuge. There are things that you have to do to survive that you may not be too proud of; things like luring away a guard from a church basement in order to sneak into the basement, and take some of their supplies because you and your survivors are starving. Then you can trade with the priest that's up in the sanctuary.

But you also have to avoid the soldiers because they can easily kill you. You don't know when you're playing the game how long the war is going to be, you don't know how long you'll be able to hold out, or survive or even if you will survive. Later on, I think it was a year or two down the road, they added children and that just made things much more complicated.

But it was still, I wouldn't say fun, an engaging game because you saw the world through the eyes of a child and how childhood can be affected by war and by this conflict that's going on. You don't even know what people are fighting over and it makes you realize that a lot of times combat is unnecessary and a lot of times war is unnecessary.

So when you had the children, they were able to help out as far as you taught them how to cook, you taught them how to do different things in the shelter, but they couldn't go out and get supplies. They were just little kids, so you had to take care of different things and different people around your shelter. It would make you so paranoid that when people would come to your door seeking help, you didn't know if they were there to trade with you, if they were there to help you out, or if they were there for the same reason you were going out at night; but they were going out during the day to try and rob you of your stuff.

I personally never answered the door to anyone except one person who I knew was a trader. From there I would trade with them the stuff that they had, for some stuff I had, and that included things like bandages and medicine.

There were a few times I was able to make it to the end of the war because eventually the war does end. It becomes a horrible winter and there was only one time where my main person that I would use to go out during the day was killed. He was killed by another civilian when trying to run away and that hit me harder than any first person shooter that I've ever played, and any storyline that I ever come across in a game. Because you got connected to these characters, you're rooting for these characters, the seemingly faceless characters but they have a face.

They're the face of anyone and everyone who has ever gone through the struggle of war and conflict in a country or in their very home and I love that the developers donated the money from this game to different survival charities. That way, people can raise awareness that these things are happening in real time. Unfortunately, they're happening all the time and there has to be a way for us to be better at solving conflict than starting wars. Because really there's no winner in war; it's only loss, it's only struggle, especially for the people who are not involved.