This War of Mine's Forget Celebrations DLC hurts, and that's good

This world could be beautiful, right? We could make this place beautiful.

Will Borger

December 19, 2024 7:00 AM

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Nobody wins a war. One side just loses more slowly, watches more people die, endures more horror. Winning is surviving another day. This War of Mine gets that. It’s been a hot second since I booted up 11 bit Studios 2014’s stunning “this-is-what-war-does-to-civilians” survival game, and I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. To be honest, I was kind of surprised to see This War of Mine still getting DLC, and I found myself wondering how I’d feel about it now. What else could This War of Mine explore? Would it hit me as hard?

The answer, of course, was yes. Sadly, This War of Mine is just as relevant as it's ever been. That probably says something about us. Not you, or me, mind, but people. Humanity. What we’re capable of, and how happy we are to inflict it on other people. This War of Mine, and the Forget Celebrations DLC, is just a video game. Playing it won’t help you understand, really understand, what it means to survive in a war zone. But it makes you think about what it would be like. It makes you feel it, at least some part of it. And that’s not nothing.

Forget Celebrations sees you take on the role of Katia, a war correspondent struggling to write a book about what happens to people in conflict zones when a missile hits her home. Injured and hoping to be rescued by her publisher, Katia is determined to find the remains of her book and survive in the process.

Forget Celebrations plays how I remember. You’ve got a group of survivors to manage, so you’ll have to make sure they have food, water, shelter, and the ability to defend themselves. In general, that means scavenging what you can, building up your shelter, and hoping for the best. What makes it interesting, though are when things start to go wrong. Do you help someone who comes to the door needing a bandage for a friend when you know Katia will probably need it herself? When you’re running low on food, do you scavenge what you can, or barter from the elderly man and his son who used to run the store across the way? Do you risk your character’s life and steal from the local militia? What about when someone tries to steal from you? 

Video games are generally designed to be beaten. There are right answers, good outcomes, systems you can learn and exploit to get the outcome you want. This War of Mine is not most games. You don’t win; you survive, and it comes at a cost. You feel it when you steal from that elderly man and his son, when you traipse through the ruins of an abandoned house, when your survivors are depressed and cold and injured and worried about the future and each other, and just want a goddamn cigarette. And as the nights close in, and looters take what little you have, and people start to get sick, you learn who you are. Yes, Katia’s book is important, and the stories you’ll collect writing it are heartbreaking, but what are they worth? What is a life worth? What will you do to survive? Who will you hurt? When the chips are done and it’s time to show your cards, who are you?

There aren’t easy answers in Forget Celebrations. Watching what people will do to each other (and learning what you might be willing to do in your worst moments) hurts. It should. Art is not supposed to make us comfortable. Forget Celebrations works because it understands that, understands that empathy is a choice we extend to other people, not just something that happens. There is power in that choice. At our best, we can wield it to make the world better. We are all we have. Our choices, and the stories we tell, matter. If my time with Forget Celebrations has reminded me of anything, it’s that in the end, no matter where we are, the horizon is the same distance away, and we’re all just hoping to make it to the sunrise.

These impressions are based on a PC code provided by the publisher. This War of Mine: Forget Celebrations is available now on PC.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.