It’s not uncommon to see game take moments of the world’s history and apply it into a game with some interesting twists. That was the general basis of the Assassin’s Creed series, as well as in games such as Papers, Please! and Return of the Obra Dinn. And while some games like Hell Let Loose takes WW2 into a realistic shooter with historically accurate guns and tanks, others take on a more brutal reality of what the cities can look like during wars. That’s the case with developing team Pixelated Milk and their work on Warsaw:
While it isn’t very realistic, with an art style drawn from Hellboy’s Mike Mignola, it does put into perspective of how the fighting can take to the streets rather than the battlegrounds.
Warsaw takes place in Warsaw, Poland, revolving around a team of rebels against the invading forces. Each of the rebels has their own set of skills, and not all of them are soldiers. Most of them are accidental heroes, survived civilians, criminals, and scouts, each varying in how they fight and help the group, even going as far as having different personas on how they interact with the squad.
There are three main stages of the game: the shelter/home base, city patrols, and turn-based combat that results from said city patrols. The goal is to gain more members to join the rebellion against the Nazi’s, find supplies, and fortify the rebellion. Besies helping the squad become better fighters with specific skills and uses to help, there’s also the strategy of who to use and when to use them. The constant fear of one of the people dying goes beyond losing a member of the rebellion but also their specific skill set.
The game, while completely strategy based, does have a lot of overlying themes of death and fear. After all, it is based in a time when fear and death were the only things happening. Warsaw isn’t going to be a light-hearted game, and it shows from the trailer and the themes.
Warsaw will be coming out sometime in 2019 for PC, PS4 and then later on Nintendo Switch. There will be a demo for it at PAX East in Boston March 28-31. To keep up with Warsaw, check out the Steam page, or the game’s twitter.