New war video game is set in a hospital
Plus: Another Tetris record is broken, and nominees are in for 2023's best indie game.
Thirty soldiers had already died on the operating table. The doctors in the virtual World War I hospital I was managing were exhausted. But the soldiers they’d successfully patched up were back in the trenches, holding the line.
Back in England, HQ was furious with my decision to let one of our better fighters go home. He had begged to be done with combat. HQ withheld resources, and I was unable to hire a needed medic.
And a new problem arose: The people working in the hospital were going hungry. Supplies were low. I halved everyone’s rations.
Morale plummeted and eventually hit a critical point. Soon enough: Game Over.
War Hospital, a new PC and console strategy game from Warsaw-based Brave Lamb Studio, is meant to be stressful and overwhelming.
“We wanted the players to be able to feel a little of what the staff of a WW1 field hospital felt and be able to experience the choices they were making,” the game’s lead developer, Michał Dziwniel, told me this morning over email.
“First and most important was a feeling of choosing between life and death for each soldier, not as a set of numbers, but as a human being.”
Players primarily view the game from an overhead perspective as they manage a British field hospital in 1918 somewhere in the war’s Western Front.
There’s a patient intake center, where you choose which wounded soldiers to treat and in what order. Given the limits of time and resources, you may decide that some soldiers will have to settle for a quick amputation. You can also decline to treat the most grievously wounded.
There’s an operating ward, where complications during surgery force decisions about altering operations, using up precious supplies or risking a more likely death.
There’s a rehabilitation center, where soldiers can be sent back to the trenches (the better to protect the hospital and its surrounding community), sent to HQ (resulting in resources to improve the hospital), or released from duty (boosting town morale).
The developers at Brave Lamb want players to feel some of the stress of running a real battlefield hospital. That means having doctors and nurses get tired, having that fatigue impact their work, having their personalities clash. Brave Lamb has tuned the hospital’s resources to keep them scarce. Bandages run low, to say nothing of medicine for dealing with chemical wounds. The developers want to ensure “that there is never a situation in the hospital that runs ‘too smoothly,’” Dziwniel says.
War Hospital is the latest release in the informal sub-genre of Bleak Video Games About Difficult Choices, which trace back, at least, to 2014’s This War Of Mine from another Polish studio, 11 Bit. That acclaimed game about civilian survival during urban warfare was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-’90s and has in turn led other game studios, like Brave Lamb, to draw less than glorious inspiration from the warfare in our world. 11 Bit’s next project, 2018’s Frostpunk, challenged players to maintain a city in a frozen wasteland and care for its population. Such games present ostensibly wrenching decisions, at least for the players suspending their disbelief. Do you let this person die to get food to feed your family? Do you allow for child labor to power through a cold winter?
Brave Lamb’s Dziwniel knows that some War Hospital players won’t feel the moral weight of his game’s choices. Some will play it as if it was any mathematical system, choosing to maximize the stat for soldiers’ lives saved (or, perhaps, the stat for deaths) without feeling emotional about it. “There are always players like that,” he says. “In my opinion, you cannot fight that, because you always fail in the end. These are specific kinds of players, who derive fun from mastery of game systems.”
But Brave Lamb hopes that many players will buy into the setting and that their game’s code will conjure an experience that feels woefully human. They might feel, Dziwniel and his team believe, that these are lives on the line. To aid this, War Hospital names its wounded soldiers and offers background details about their lives. An in-game memorial keeps adding the names of more dead. Some troops have little stories around them. At one point, a seriously wounded soldier is brought to the hospital. He was fighting for Germany. What kind of treatment should he get?
The player who feels the weight of all of this might nonetheless become numb to it. To an extent, that, too, is desired, Dziwniel says: “This is something that happens naturally to any human being after going through a sufficient number of cases. It happened to the doctors in the WW1 field hospitals and it will happen to players during play, as they decide the fate of hundreds of cases. We wanted to show players how any person can get to the point where they do not think of patients as humans anymore, regardless of their intentions.”
War Hospital has been in development for several years, originally slated for a December 2022 release before slipping for more development time, as these things do. In that time, wars in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere have only made the horrors of combat more vivid.
“Our focus on showing the cruelty of war and focusing on humanity in the face of extreme amounts of death and destruction did not change much,” Dziwniel says. “It was the story we wanted to tell, and events in the world did not impact this– it only ensured us that what we were doing was the right direction.
“The main goal was always to show the war, not as this romanticized version known from most films or games, but as a more realistic look [at] the costs of war for people fighting in it.”
Item 2: Tetris has been defeated again
Just two weeks after 13-year-old Willis “BlueScuti” Gibson made worldwide headlines for becoming the first person to defeat the classic Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris (by playing deep enough to force the game to crash), fellow elite player Justin “Fractal161” Yu has done the same. He did it 21 seconds faster, in 38:04.
Yu triggered the crash at level 155, two levels earlier than Gibson, who had missed what is believed to be the earliest possible crash trigger. These late-game crashes occur because the game’s code is overwhelmed, according to a helpful breakdown of Gibson’s run by David “aGameScout” Macdonald. Tetris’ code isn’t meant to run games this long and starts dropping glitched block colors before it eventually freezes. AI-assisted runs had first revealed the possible crashes. Gibson was the first human to do it, in late 2023.
As chronicled in a new video by Macdonald, Yu accomplished his feat on Jan. 3, just as the world was discovering what Gibson had done. Yu’s achievement is now being recognized thanks to Macdonald’s newest video, which ends with a twist: a third player, Andrew "PixelAndy" Artiaga, also crashed Tetris, also at level 155, on Jan. 4.
In brief…
🚨 More layoffs:
Mobile publisher and developer Playtika is laying off as many as 400 workers, CTech reports. Cuts stem from plans to wind down a company office in Belarus, more outsourcing of customer support and the scaling back of Playtika’s Web3 operations, a source familiar with the moves tells Game File.
A “sizable portion” of Lost Boys Interactive, a studio of some 400 workers owned by Gearbox (which is itself owned by the aggressively cost-cutting Embracer Group) have been laid off, Aftermath reports.
🤔 GameStop is getting out of the crypto business and will shut down its NFT marketplace early next month, Decrypt reports. It launched the NFT shop in July, 2022.
👀 Controversial arcade gamer Billy Mitchell and arcade record database Twin Galaxies have settled their long-running lawsuits against each other, Courthouse News Service reports.
A half decade ago, Twin Galaxies had stripped Mitchell of record scores in Donkey Kong and other classic games after an investigation into alleged cheating (read: whether he played on a modified game cabinet). In 2019, Mitchell sued for defamation, and was countersued in 2021. The parties were set to go to trial later this year. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
🏆 The Game of the Year nominees for the 27th annual D.I.C.E. Awards are: Alan Wake 2, Baldur’s Gate III, Cocoon, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The winners will be announced during a live streamed ceremony on February 15.
🏆 The finalists for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize (basically: indie game of the year) at the 2024 Independent Games Festival are: 1000xResist, A Highland Song, Anthology of the Killer, Cocoon, Mediterranea Inferno, and Venba. The winners will be announced during a live streamed ceremony on March 20.
💰 Microsoft has passed Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, at $2.89 trillion, a boom partially attributed to Microsoft’s work in generative AI, The New York Times reports.
The AI boom is likely to play a big role in Microsoft’s gaming business. At the company’s annual meeting in December, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described gaming as “a core business for us.” He added: “I see tremendous synergy between what we’re doing up and down the AI stack… When I think about AI, what we’re doing at the infrastructure layer or what we will do at the edge, it’s sort of: The same set of transistors that first were used for graphics, guess what, are being used for AI. So you can connect the dots and see why gaming is going to be more strategic to us.”
⁉️ I almost missed it, but Mobile Suit Baba is a spin-off to 2019’s brilliant the-rules-are-in-game-objects puzzle game Baba Is You. Baba developer Hempuli says the game is heavily inspired by another all-timer, 2018’s Into The Breach. I’m so glad RockPaperShotgun flagged this. MSB came out in December.
I wonder if the designer of the War Hospital game had any idea how relevant it would become with the situation in Gaza.