This War of Mine

First off, I know this game is, at this point, quite old. I have waited to write my review in order to see if anything changed and from what I can see, it has not. Given that, I'll write my review from my perspective and those who read it can take it or leave it. There's no argument to be had; it's why it's called "my review" and "my opinion." Would I recommend this game to anyone? No, I can't say that I would. Is it because the game is just horrible and bad? Not at all. As a survival premise, it's pretty good. The main reason I wouldn't recommend it is best described this way: "omniscient morality." The idea of the developers was to create a game that, basically, punished you if you did bad things. The problem is with how it's implemented. You have someone at your base who is dying. You enter a home and find that the people there have a number of antibiotics, so you steal one. No one sees you, and there is, literally, no way your group can know you did so. They're miles away, they're sleeping. Despite this, the game applies a group wide depression debuff because "you were bad." There's no shades, there's no real morality - it's just "do anything we consider bad, and you're punished." I'm not talking about walking into the house, murdering the inhabitants and taking their stuff, here. Nope, doesn't matter. Everyone's depressed. Apparently the idea is that the developers wanted to show that "survival comes at a psychological cost." Well, at the risk of sounding cruel, if the choice comes between stealing antibiotics or letting someone die, their life outweighs my desire to not steal, the same way that a starving man or woman will steal food to survive. It's not a "good/bad" decision. While I respect whatever the developers were trying to do, they implemented it horribly, IMO, and in a way in which you needed combination of good RNG and literally doing the right steps in the right order to "succeed." For myself, I refuse to work in that framework, and so I stopped playing it after one of the characters hanged himself because I stole food to keep someone from, you know, starving to death. That, to me, is just a lazy design. YMMV.