Enjoyment - 8/10
Difficulty - 5/10

I have been meaning to play This War of Mine for a long time. When I found that This War of Mine: Final Cut was coming to PS+, I knew I had to give it a go. After a few playthroughs getting to grips with the game mechanics, I finally got the platinum trophy.

This War of Mine: Final Cut is a survival game that provides a stark reminder of the horrors of war. You control a number of survivors who have different skills and traits that can help or hinder your survival. In order for you to survive, you have to maintain the physical and mental health of your survivors. However, if you find yourself struggling to maintain this, you will have to decide whether or not you steal precious resources from others or outright kill them. Based on the decisions you make throughout the game, your survivors will voice their own opinion through their inner monologues, further cementing the positive and negative consequences of your actions. This War of Mine: Final Cut’s gameplay loop can be mixed up by creating your own story, changing a variety of settings including survivors, maps, weather, and length of the war.

Considering the trophy list, I never found myself bored with my time going for the platinum. There was always something I could work on in the moment and plan for in a future playthrough. The biggest hurdle of the game is understanding the mechanics and discovering what actions influences which stat. When you get the hang of it, This War of Mine: Final Cut is a straightforward platinum trophy.
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The amount of hours I've spent on this vs the amount I've paid is insane. Well over 150 and it goes on sale for like, 2 bucks.

Your initial first playthrough, the game will feel miserable and you will have to make tough decisions. The first time experiencing this is very special.

Multiple playthroughs in, the tone of the game begins to change. You don't feel the impact of the game as much, but you instead get sucked into the mechanics and the skills of the various characters. It becomes less of a story and more of a game if that makes sense, but I mean it in a good way!

It took a long time on Switch but we did eventually get all of the content. If we didn't the score would be much lower. As a port it is just ok. I have had the occasional crash, but nothing crazy.

It's a really memorable experience that I can't recommend enough. Really easy to get lost and dive in deep to this one.

This War of Mine: Final Cut é um game que cumpre totalmente a sua proposta. O título demonstra de uma forma crua o outro lado da guerra e como ela é prejudicial para as pessoas que querem apenas sobreviver. Logo, no jogo teremos que nos deparar com vários escolhas importantes que irão impactar diretamente na sobrevivencia dos personagens e com os acontecimentos ao redor deles.

Por fim, o game consegue ser uma lição importante sobre a guerra e demonstrar que ela não acontece da maneira romantizada que outros games costumam demonstrar. Portanto, mais do que apenas um jogo, This War of Mine: Final Cut é uma reflexão sobre humanidade e sobre as coisas que realmente importam na vida.

This game is near perfect in achieving what it sets out to do, making the player feel as if they have to survive a war, and it does it almost to a fault. The entire game is a completely stressful and almost miserable experience, at some point the only thing keep you going is the hope that the end is coming soon, yes the game makes you wish it is over as soon as possible and thats a good thing. There is one area however I feel the devs have went a bit too hard on, and that is character death. By the end of the game you will have to venture into some very dangerous places at night, and if you so much as click accidentally or be in an unfortunate position when a guard opens a door, you are pretty much dead, and your character stays dead, make the mistake (or get your players AI bug out) a few times and your playthrough is dead. I had to alt+f4 when I got spotted just so I could get through the final 3 days and finish the war. If this area was just a little bit more forgiving, this would've been a 10. (kinda shows how good the game is by how much I can talk about it lmao)

This War of Mine initially makes a strong impression - survivors fending for their lives, foraging supplies, food, and even staving off attackers not in a zombie scenario or post-apocalyptic hellscape, but in a realistic civil war in the fictional country of Pogoren. I don't believe such a scenario had been tackled before, at least not as famously, as in this game, so I was immediately interested. At first, the game had me entirely hooked, I was playing multiple multi-hour sessions at a time, and despite some initial troubles, I got into the swing of things pretty quickly. Managing my characters was fun and challenging at first. However, as time went on, I ended up realizing how shallow the game truly was both mechanically and thematically. Although the game attempts to show the true horrors of the civilian perspective of war, you don't see a whole lot and the moral choices you have to make end up losing their emotional effect pretty quickly. As it turns out, the mechanically advantageous choices are all the immoral ones, and on repeat attempts, there's practically no reason to go for anything else other than some self-imposed limitation. The game is, unfortunately, lacking in variety: the trader always has the same supplies, multiple runs will have the same areas to scavenge with no differences (there is some variance, but largely it's the same areas), you'll always have a cold front or a crime wave, et cetera. Once you've played maybe, six attempts, you've seen it all, and the game doesn't offer much more. The stealth, combat, and scavenging mechanics are all fairly basic and offer little depth. Even when it comes to the anti-war themes the game tries to push, it can't help but feel unbelievably surface-level and spoonfed to the player. The worldbuilding memos the player finds are too impersonal, and the character interactions are so threadbare that it becomes difficult to care.

At least the presentation isn't bad, the game is clearly low-budget but it has at times fairly striking art direction. The grim, almost monochrome, paper sketch style fits the tone very well and at the very least makes the game look as grim as it wishes it was. Asset quality is fairly low, but when compared to how pulled back the camera is, this is hard to notice even at high resolutions. Environments are surprisingly detailed and seem to tell better stories than the actual writing does. My only real complaint is the lack of anti-aliasing, which can make the game look overly cheap at points. The soundtrack is well-produced and can be suitably atmospheric, but I can't help but feel it's too overbearing and "epic" sounding for the kind of intimate stories this game wants to tell.

This War of Mine clearly has fans, but I didn't want to see the entire game through. While it was quite addictive at first, the simplicity of the gameplay and themes did not grab my attention for more than 15 hours. At least the art style is kind of nice.