Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 24: Chapter #24: In War, There’s Only Survival

[ The disaster brought about by the endless siege forced people to band together just to survive, but it also shattered countless communities. Lone survivors who cross paths by chance often ignore their differences, choosing to stick together in times of war. ]

[ Roman used to be a front-line soldier, but after witnessing a mass execution, he deserted. Emilia is a lawyer. Before the war, she lived in a luxurious villa with her father and sister. ]

[ She is the only survivor of her family. ]

[ At least for now, they are quite satisfied with each other’s company. They decided to find a house that is not severely damaged and hide out for the time being. ]

Silver stared at the introductory text on his monitor, feeling as though he had just been struck by lightning. He glanced at the UI in the upper left corner of the screen, which coldly displayed the current time, the freezing temperature, and the day counter.

’A house that is not severely damaged?’ Silver thought, his eye twitching as he looked at the cross-section of the shelter on his screen.

There were only two survivors in the building, Roman and Emilia. The structure itself was a completely bombed-out ruin. A massive, gaping hole spanning two entire stories had been blown through the side of the brick wall, meaning the house couldn’t even block the freezing wind. There was absolutely zero valuable furniture left in the rooms; the only chairs available were just splintered wooden planks hastily nailed together.

If the game considered this ’not severely damaged,’ he didn’t even want to imagine what a ruined building looked like.

He genuinely never expected a war game to start with such a bleak, pathetic setup. After clicking through the brief, intuitive tutorial, the harsh reality of the mechanics fully set in. In this game, the player wasn’t controlling a hyper-lethal super-soldier dropping from the sky with an assault rifle to save the day.

Here, you played as ordinary, terrified civilians.

They were completely unarmed, they had no medical supplies, and they didn’t even have a scrap of food.

The game had only one objective: Survive. Live until the eventual ceasefire.

"Survival games? I’ve played a hundred different wilderness survival simulators. This is going to be trivial," Silver scoffed, waving a hand at his webcam.

It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar with the genre, but he genuinely hadn’t expected the sadistic developer behind Dead Cells to pivot to a slow-paced resource management game.

Meanwhile, across the city in the Nexus executive offices, Daniel Fenn was staring at his own monitor in utter bewilderment.

As the General Manager of the platform, he had been paying extremely close attention to the concurrent launch of these two titles.

He knew exactly what Nexus’s flagship shooter was capable of, but the only variable he hadn’t been able to account for was Sprout Studio’s new release.

All the pre-launch hype and the gritty, bullet-riddled teaser trailer had convinced everyone it was a war-themed shooter, putting it on a direct collision course with Nexus.

Fenn had deliberately authorized the exact same release window to crush them. He had confidently assumed they were competing in the exact same genre.

The moment This War of Mine unlocked on Steam, Fenn had purchased a copy on his private account just to scout the competition.

But anyone booting up the game for the first time was bound to be completely thrown off guard, and Fenn was no exception.

When the screen loaded in and he saw the 2D characters slowly rummaging through piles of rubble in a dilapidated, cross-sectioned building just to find a handful of scrap parts, his brain stalled.

’This... this isn’t a shooter at all,’ Fenn realized, his face turning an ugly shade of red. ’What the hell is this?!’

Who on earth had started the rumor that this was an FPS game? You call a 2D civilian scavenging simulator a First-Person Shooter?!

Unlike Ethan Vale’s previous two titles, which demanded razor-sharp reflexes and intense mechanical execution, the controls for this new game were almost insultingly simple.

It required nothing more than a few basic mouse clicks.

There was absolutely no need for high APM or reaction speed.

Back on his broadcast, Silver was currently falling deep into the game’s oppressive atmosphere.

He remembered reading a quote in a military history book once: ’I asked a chaplain if it was a sin to kill in war. The chaplain said that as long as you don’t learn to enjoy killing, you will be fine.’

Silver had only ever experienced war through movies, books, and video games.

But in all those digital wars, he had always been a heroic soldier wielding an arsenal of weapons, bravely fighting his way out of an enemy encirclement.

He had never been forced to play as a starving civilian.

During the first few in-game days, Silver managed his shelter during the sunlight hours and sent a character out to scavenge every single night.

He stuck to looting abandoned, completely uninhabited ruins.

By the fourth day, his shelter had expanded; a random survivor had knocked on their door begging for shelter, and Silver had taken him in, bringing their group to three.

But on the night of the fifth day, Silver sent Roman out to scavenge for food and materials as usual.

Sitting at his desk, the usual confident, sarcastic smile had completely vanished from Silver’s face. The atmosphere in the live broadcast had grown incredibly heavy. Despite having over a hundred thousand concurrent viewers, the stream chat had slowed to an eerie, sporadic crawl.

For his fifth night, Silver chose to scavenge the Supermarket location.

Supermarkets were highly contested areas, but they usually still held a few scraps of leftover food. Just finding a single can of meat or some loose vegetables could mean the difference between his survivors starving or making it through the week.

Right as Roman entered the shattered glass doors of the supermarket, Silver paused. He saw a text bubble pop up from behind a ruined wall deeper inside the store.

Silver clicked to make Roman crouch, slowly creeping forward to investigate. Peeking around the corner, he saw a man in a military uniform standing with his back to the door, holding an assault rifle. Squatting on the ground in front of the soldier was a civilian girl, frantically digging through the rubble for supplies.

"That’s a pretty name. Fits a pretty face like yours," the soldier said, a sleazy, mocking text bubble appearing over his head.

"Thank you," the girl replied, still rummaging through the debris, her posture clearly terrified and submissive.

"Looking for something?"

"I just... I just want some food."

"Food? You poor thing. Don’t worry, I can give you some food," the soldier said. The moment the dialogue box faded, the soldier raised his rifle and confidently swaggered toward the cornered girl.

Silver, who had been watching the entire exchange through a crack in the door, felt a sudden, violent spike of anger. He genuinely hadn’t expected to witness an attempted sexual assault while just trying to scavenge a ruined grocery store.

On screen, the soldier stepped forward and violently kicked the girl to the ground.

Without a single second of hesitation, Silver clicked his mouse. He didn’t care about the noise or the risk. He had Roman kick the door open, swap to his only weapon—a scavenged combat knife—and sprint directly at the soldier’s back.

Click.

A brutal backstab animation triggered, instantly killing the soldier in a spray of blood.

The terrified girl scrambled to her feet and sprinted out of the supermarket into the night, but Silver didn’t try to stop her.

He remained completely silent, his eyes locked on the monitor as he looted the dead soldier’s corpse.

He walked away with an automatic rifle, twenty rounds of ammunition, and a bottle of high-quality alcohol.

Staring at the massive haul of premium supplies sitting in his inventory, Silver didn’t say a word.

From the very beginning of the game up until this exact moment, he hadn’t killed a single person.

He had played entirely as a pacifist. But just two nights ago, armed thugs had raided his shelter while he was out scavenging.

They had stolen almost all of their hard-earned food and severely wounded Emilia in the process.

He had never played a war game this suffocatingly realistic.

In a traditional shooter, soldiers bore the moral justification of killing the enemy. The battlefield was presented as a binary conflict between good and evil.

But This War of Mine existed entirely in the gray, decaying morality of survival, where the lines between right and wrong were completely erased.

Would a normal person feel guilt for the crimes they committed in a dream once they woke up?

That question applied heavily to the actions players took in a video game. Because the player was fully conscious, completely rational, and sitting safely in a comfortable chair, every choice they made was entirely voluntary. No one was putting a gun to their real head and forcing them to act.

But when he saw that pixelated girl about to be assaulted, Silver couldn’t hold back his own morality. He had rushed in and murdered a man.

The environmental storytelling and psychological mechanics of the game were so incredibly grounded that the depression of the digital characters began to bleed directly into reality, affecting Silver’s actual mood.

At first, he genuinely hadn’t wanted to kill anyone.

He had scavenged honestly. When someone pointed a gun at him, he ran away in pure terror.

When his survivors started starving, he had desperately stolen food from an elderly couple’s house, which immediately triggered severe depression and grief status effects among his characters.

His shelter was a miserable place—his people were hungry, sick, constantly complaining, crying, and threatening to run away. Life was a noisy, exhausting, impoverished struggle.

Until today. By murdering the soldier, Silver had finally crossed the line. It was like breaking a moral seal.

With the soldier’s assault rifle in his inventory, he suddenly had the power to take whatever he wanted. He could just pick up a weapon, start killing, and ensure his survivors lived comfortably. The game was actively telling him that morality was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

But sitting in his ergonomic chair, staring at the digital blood on the supermarket floor, Silver felt a deep, overwhelming sense of suffocation.

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