Hottest take ever probably but I think this game isn't very good.

It's *okay* but the game is trivially easy to the point of being repetitive and boring up until you are forced into a combat encounter that is ruined by the awkward and clunky controls that are never tutorialized, so the first person you have fight is probably gonna die just because you don't really know how the combat works yet. The game basically has a cycle of craft + eat during day, occasionally trading, and sending someone to scavenge at night. The inventory capacity and stack sizes of the items are such that you will be spending the first few hours making repetitive trips to the same place night after night just slowing chipping away at the loot that is left there. Nothing different ever happens on these subsequent trips, you just go, fill your tiny pockets, and leave, and you do it all over again until the game decides you can't go there anymore "because war" and you need to go somewhere else, that somewhere else eventually being somewhere with hostile guys with guns who will try to kill you. So that's it, that's the game. The game makes no effort to judge you for your kind or cruel actions. If you make one of your guys knife an elderly couple to death he just says he's sad but nothing changes. I got to day 13 which took every bit of 2.5 hours and by the time I finally got gunned down by some rapist with an AK I was glad I had an excuse to stop playing. Losing a character when you only start with 3 is crippling because ideally you want to be able to rotate between guard/sleep/scavenge. The game is supposedly "about" the horrors of war as a civilian but really it is painfully ambivalent to your actions as a player. The only consequence that matters is failing the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ combat and getting a character killed. That is the only way you'll lose because everything else about the game is braindead simple.

Maybe the game is more enjoyable as a roleplay thing where you try to be a good person (and inevitably die lol) but I don't see the point. None of the moral decisions have emotional weight, nor meaningful consequences. Kill a sick dad and his son? +2 sad points +100000 loot. The game is positively sterile. I don't understand the hype, and I *really* don't understand the people with 100s of hours of playtime. 2.5h in and I was bored to tears. This game doesn't evoke any emotion because it has no characters. They are sims that may proclaim they ought to smoke more and kill less but they really don't seem to mind.

I did not like it. Very repetitive. The stories of the scenarios don't feel very immersive. It's sometimes a good challenge but not because it's very tricky to play but because you don't know the order in which you need to visit places. Once you find the right order it's easy to survive because you'll have the correct tools / materials for the next important item. But that's it. So after all it's to repetitive.

“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”