Remorse causes characters to move slower, hang their heads, decide not to perform simple tasks due to the pointlessness of it all.

Remorse is actually a tangible, ugly thing to visit upon the survivors in This War of Mine. And I then had to weigh my group's survival versus terrorizing an old couple's home.įour hours later, I returned home with enough supplies to eat for a week straight.Ī week and a half later, my scavenger still hadn’t forgiven himself. He stood there, chastising my silent character. An old man opened the door, telling me his wife is sick, and they cannot share. With no other viable alternatives, I went. There was no security, but you're told there's plenty of food and supplies there… provided you're willing to steal them. The only option that didn't involve surely taking a bullet involved entering a relatively untouched suburb. Our only weapons are a crowbar and a knife, which I left with the person whom I told to stand guard overnight at home. All legitimate avenues for obtaining foodstuffs-through barter, scavenging bombed-out ruins, trapping animals-had been exhausted. My own answer to that question came about 12 days into This War of Mine. When the soldiers are miles away, when the smoke clears, and every home harbors the ghosts of innocent bystanders, how long do you have before basic humanity is nothing but background noise compared to the constant roar of a hungry belly? Home sweet hell. Even in a game like Spec Ops: The Line, which aims to measure the toll on the people fighting a war for too long, it's not a question you need to address, because there's only one way you can ever interact with the people in front of your gun. It's not a question a game about war ever asks, and when it shows the answer, it's never in as much emotional detail as it’s shown here. Here, it’s an all-consuming, panic attack-inducing source of primal fear.

It's a meaningless bit of background detail there. An hour into This War of Mine, I keep thinking about that bit in The Last of Us where someone was somehow clear-headed enough in the middle of a war zone to scrawl 'What happens when the food runs out?' on a concrete wall on a backed-up highway.

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