It Takes a War

This game felt personal. I genuinely got uncomfortable playing through it, but I stayed until the end, because it was something I needed to hear. Thank you, Thomas Mackinnon.

[h1]Review Preamble:[/h1] Set aside an hour. Go in blind. Don't watch the trailer or read anymore reviews. Wear headphones. Test your mic before launching the game. Have some patience. Try to finish it in one session. [h1]Actual Review:[/h1] I'm going to slap clay on an invisible shape, then turn it towards you and hope you see what I'm trying to share with you. I think calling out [b][i]"SPOILERS!!"[/i][/b] is a bit of a failure of media literacy - the belief that the whole point of an experience is the ending - but in this case, talking about the journey could colour your enjoyment of it. Please don't read onward unless you've played the game already. [spoiler] It Takes a War can be a sobering experience. A eulogy at the funeral of a fixed time, place, and setting. Alone at the center of our own tiny bedroom-sized kingdoms, with all the freedom to dream up a world outside where things never have to change, or grow, or rot. A world where the comfortable, familiar, digital spaces we inhabit - from the confines of our rooms, with the disembodied voices of those most eager, tired, and microwave-ready friends - aren't slowly and surely wasting away. So many of us spent our formative years in those spaces. Hard years, like grass pushing up through the cracks in concrete must be hard. Spaces that we could traverse in the dark, recalled as easily as the streets we rode our bikes down - memorizing the cracks and bumps and sandy cul-de-sacs where tires would skid. When words like gaslight, recession, collapse, and uncertainty are background, and time was an endless resource that refilled every night when you closed your eyes to sleep. Those spaces, and the people that inhabited them, felt timeless. People that were waiting in those lobbies as though they'd always be right where you left them when you logged off for the day. Real-enough friends in fake spaces that felt as tangible as our kingdoms. As time becomes more sparse and our attention slips to new novel experiences, the things we leave behind end up decaying in our absence. Those spaces, those friends, the conversations we had, and what it meant to us. From our ivory towers, it becomes easy to reframe those tired, late-night conversations in the negative and read words and actions as intention. Candy-coated nostalgia comes to encase the digital shrines we prayed at but revisiting their glossy sweetness can ultimately ruin our appetites for more of the same. And those feelings we had and maybe still have end up entombed there, crystaline and saccharine. Each revisit less sweet as familiarity paves a desire path to resentment, contempt. But none of it is real. At the time it felt so, but it isn't and wasn't, and while those spaces may still ring hollow, the folks we feel we may have left behind in them still walk the earth and the assumption that their interior lives are somehow less real and less complicated is a nasty fixture of how easily we can come to imagine their souls trapped in the voice chats of old dead games. And again, it was never real. It takes a lot of hard years, like grass pushing up through concrete, to come to see and feel these things differently. It takes a war to say goodbye.[/spoiler]

when people say that games are art they're always on some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like the Last of Us Part II. This is what games as art actually should be.

Kinda need jerma to play this

Game spoiler [spoiler] This game reminded me that my friends (IRL) both have lives that I don't see, and they in turn don't see what goes on in my life. I personally think that being self centered and understanding what others can be going through is where most of us fail, but knowing this, we need to forgive others for not understanding our own situations. This game also reminded me of a time when a good few of my "friends" who I thought were good people turned out to be complete jerks, but now I can take time to understand that they also had issues with their lives, had people hurting them too. We must also remember that no one is perfect, not you nor I and we need to forgive others for being human, and sometimes we just need to let go entirely... sorry for ranting on. [/spoiler] id rate this game 10/10

I think a lot of teenagers would find It Takes a War to have something important to say. I know it was an important lesson that I learned too late when I was growing up. But as a game that, aesthetically, is targeting a demographic in their early 30s, the game is fundamentally unable to reach the audience that most needs to hear it, and that's a shame. The creative choice to theme this as an awkward CS 1.6 ripoff might speak to adults who remember the pain of this from their own childhood, but I can't help but feel sad that the kids who really need this game will never see it because of this creative decision. The experience as a whole is generally middle-of-the-road for me. I don't want to leave a negative review because the game was quaint, and it did speak to me in some way. But as game with design choices that prevent it from reaching the audience that really needs it, questionable NPC pathfinding that actively takes you out of the experience, painful gunplay, and some less-than-perfect dialogue timing that makes deliveries feel somewhat artificial and stilted, this is a game with a solid core premise that is sadly riddled with issues undermining its potential. If I could give a neutral rating I would, but barring that I have to respect my own integrity and say that what it achieves mechanically and technically isn't particularly enjoyable, and if you're the kind of person the aesthetics appeal to you're probably not the kind of person who'll find value in the message. So, a negative review this will have to be, even though I care deeply about the message and respect everything the author was trying to do here.

my teammates ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ suck omg go play something else

Pros: The facade of the game as a non-narrative was interesting. The ending was the first time I felt engaged. Cons: I couldn't feel much for the characters and their chatting. As an achievement hunter, the Steam achievements took me out of the story. I felt rushed to find random things to shoot and interact with instead of focusing on the conversations. The price point of $6 for about an hour of content is a bit steep. Overall, it's an interesting short story but lacks engagement. I think there is potential for great works from this developer in the future.

Similar to the Stanley Parable or Beginner's Guide. Provokes you to think about how friendships online work, and the connections you have with others. Sometimes it really does take a war to say farewell. Go explore the great unknown and try to find someone in this galaxy.