Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 25: Chapter #25: The Cost of War

In This War of Mine, the radio was an absolutely vital piece of equipment.

If a player wanted to engage in the game’s brutal bartering economy, the radio was essential for gathering market information to survive the siege.

Even for players who ignored the trading mechanics, building a radio was non-negotiable.

In a bombed-out shelter that couldn’t even keep the freezing wind out, predicting the weather was a matter of life and death.

Players had to frantically hoard water and chop wood before the temperature plummeted; it was the only way to keep their characters alive through the long, unforgiving winter.

The in-game radio featured five distinct frequencies: Modern Music, Classical Music, Radio One, City News, and Weather.

Amidst the smoldering embers of the ruined city, having the survivors listen to classical music could slightly improve their mood, though the buff was incredibly minor.

As Silver dug deeper into the mechanics, he realized that managing the characters’ psychological state was the single most critical aspect of the game.

The entire aesthetic was rendered in stark, heavy shades of charcoal and grayscale, accompanied by an endlessly oppressive acoustic soundtrack that highlighted the suffocating despair of a war zone.

This wasn’t a game about heroism; it was a simulator designed to drag the darkest, ugliest aspects of human nature to the surface and whip the player with them.

In peacetime, stealing would obviously weigh heavily on a normal person’s conscience.

But in the middle of a brutal war zone, did abandoning your morals shield you from suffering?

The game’s answer was a resounding no. Murdering scavengers, burning down homes, and stealing from the innocent would plummet a character’s mood.

The survivors would suffer varying degrees of psychological trauma, and ironically, those who were naturally happier and more fulfilled before the war broke down much faster than the rest.

Every survivor had a different psychological threshold, and the constant stress of the siege made mental collapse an ever-present threat.

When supplies ran critically low, not every character could flip a switch and become a ruthless killer. In fact, merely turning away a beggar at the door would inflict severe guilt on the group.

Refusing to help starving children, turning a blind eye to neighbors in need, or raiding a bombed-out hospital for medical supplies would leave the characters deeply depressed and traumatized.

Certain characters, however, possessed a more callous baseline. Survivors like Bruno the chef, Emilia the lawyer, and Marin the handyman were distinctly more cold-blooded.

But that apathy only extended to turning a blind eye when other group members committed atrocities. If they were forced to pull the trigger or steal the food themselves, they still suffered massive emotional penalties.

There was no easy out. For some characters, committing crimes inflicted less immediate trauma, but performing acts of kindness yielded massive boosts to their morale.

Yet, a player couldn’t simply use these apathetic characters as sociopathic murder weapons to freely slaughter their way through the city.

No matter how hardened a survivor was, shedding too much blood would inevitably break their mind. Even cold-blooded killers had a breaking point.

When a character’s mental state collapsed, they became completely unplayable. They would refuse to get out of bed, lose control of their actions, abandon the shelter in the middle of the night, or outright commit suicide.

The easiest mechanical way to restore their mood was simply to feed them until they were full. But in a besieged city, having enough food to be ’full’ was a near-impossible luxury.

Once Silver figured out this underlying psychological system, he naturally gravitated toward playing as the societal outcasts. It was significantly easier to manage the mental health of a small, hardened group than a house full of idealists.

In peacetime, these people were the absolute bottom-feeders of society—the kinds of invisible people who never saw the spotlight. But in the ruins of a war zone?

The thieves, the cynical cooks, and the military deserters thrived. Each of them possessed unique survival traits perfectly adapted to the nightmare they were living in.

In this extreme, hyper-lethal environment, trying to play the saint usually guaranteed you would be the first one to die. You had to constantly fend off desperate looters trying to raid your shelter every night.

The prestigious members of civilized society—the lawyers, the mathematicians, the school principals—were completely useless in a firefight and struggled just to protect themselves.

Conversely, the disgraced soldiers, the manual laborers, and the petty thieves navigated the ruins like fish in water.

Over the course of his playthrough, Silver lost count of how many people he had robbed. If they resisted, he gunned them down; if they cowered, he just took their supplies.

By the end of his run, his eyes were completely numb, staring blankly at the screen. Wasn’t killing people the standard objective in video games? Mechanically, his run was a massive success.

His shelter was fully upgraded, bursting with hoarded supplies.

His characters had hot meals when they were hungry and endless cigarettes to smoke every single day.

He had sent Roman to butcher an entire military outpost, and he had slaughtered innocent scavengers in the half-destroyed houses.

But despite living in absolute luxury by wartime standards, the three survivors in his shelter were trapped in a state of severe, chronic depression.

The mental toll of their actions was inescapable. After butchering the scavengers in the ruined house, one of his survivors spent days staring blankly at the wall.

A week later, that survivor packed up a few cans of food and abandoned the shelter in the dead of night.

Roman, the ex-soldier who had ruthlessly cleared out the military barracks, started violently brawling with Bruno the chef every single day. Both men sustained heavy injuries from the infighting, and both were emotionally shattered.

Eventually, the chef couldn’t take it anymore and fled into the dark. By the end of the run, Roman was the only one left.

He sat alone in the fully stocked shelter, eating and drinking in total silence, day after day, night after night, until the ceasefire was finally declared on day forty.

When the run officially ended, the screen faded to black, slowly rolling through the post-war epilogues of the characters Silver had managed.

The text laid bare the long-term consequences of every decision he had made. It detailed the fates of the people he had helped, but it didn’t spare him from his sins.

If he had stolen an elderly couple’s food, the epilogue explicitly informed him how they had starved to death in the cold. It flatly stated that his actions had directly, or indirectly, caused their murders.

Silver sat in absolute silence. He stared at the polaroid photos and the bleak text on his monitor.

There were no grand cutscenes, just a few devastating paragraphs.

[Roman survived the war, but he was completely consumed by the trauma of his actions. He eventually fell into organized crime and died of a severe drug overdose a few years later.]

[The survivor who massacred the innocent scavengers in the ruined house resurfaced years later as the ruthless leader of a violent street gang.]

[Bruno, the chef who fled the shelter, attempted to navigate the city at night to find an old friend. He was gunned down in the street by a military patrol.]

Reading the horrific outcomes of his ’successful’ run, Silver was rendered completely speechless.

Without saying a single word to his chat, he reached up and turned off his webcam. He sat alone in the dark room, chain-smoking one cigarette after another.

[GamerDad88: bro... this ending is actually depressing af]

[LoreMaster: he won the game but lost his soul]

[xX_Sniper_Xx: this is way too real man]

[Salty_Tears: wait where did Silver go? he turned off the cam]

If a character killed too many innocent people, or if they ended the war in a severely depressed state, the epilogue usually revealed that they committed suicide shortly after peacetime was restored.

It turned out the game wasn’t just about mechanically surviving the siege for forty days; it was about whether the person who survived was still human by the end of it.

"This game is way too fucking depressing," Silver said, his voice hoarse. "Seriously, if you’re under eighteen, do not play this."

The moment the words left his mouth, he abruptly ended the broadcast.

He didn’t do his usual outro, and he didn’t say goodbye to his tens of thousands of viewers.

Sitting alone with his stream offline, Silver stared blankly at the dark, grayscale title screen of This War of Mine.

His mind drifted back to a specific news broadcast he had heard on the in-game radio a few days prior.

’It is almost impossible to find real meat on the streets anymore. Citizens are advised to be extremely cautious when buying meat from unknown sources.’

While playing, Silver had merely absorbed that information as a mechanical cue that raw food prices were spiking on the trading market. But sitting there now, fully processing the grim reality of the setting, a wave of pure nausea rolled through his stomach.

The fundamental concept of currency was entirely deformed in a war zone. People always repeated the old adage: invest in antiques during times of peace, and hoard gold during times of chaos.

After finishing his playthrough, Silver realized that in a true societal collapse, gold was absolute bullshit. The only currencies that actually held value were weapons, medical supplies, tobacco, high-proof alcohol, and raw food.

Especially during the bitter winter, where feeding the heater was the only thing keeping you from freezing to death.

In the game’s brutal economy, a flawless diamond couldn’t even buy you a cheap bottle of vodka, let alone a can of meat.

But a single pack of rolled cigarettes? That could buy you twenty rounds of assault rifle ammunition.

As the days bled into weeks, the radio weather reports constantly reminded the player of the impending doom.

[The temperature is expected to drop sharply over the next few days. It is going to get incredibly cold out there. As if the war wasn’t punishing enough.]

It meant the brutal winter was finally arriving.

And the cold spared no one.

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