8 Times You Failed To Be The Hero In Video Games

Based on the devastating real-life Siege of Sarajevo, This War Of Mine is a powerful rumination on the civilian cost of war and one of the bleakest games you'll ever have the dubious honour of playing.

Rather than filling the big stompy boots of the big lads shooting at each other, this war game has you control a group of civilian survivors as they attempt to make a home out of a bombed out building and survive the siege without dying of - among other things - starvation, exposure or disease. What great fun!

Things start simply enough, with the player controlling one of their characters as they scavenge abandoned houses and gas stations for baked beans and moonshine. However, once all the empty buildings have been stripped down, you'll have to begin encroaching on areas occupied by other desperate, starving survivors with no less claim to goods than you. While some may be willing to trade, others will understandably be attached to their resources and can only be persuaded by being bloodily beaten to death with a piece of rusty pipe. You may even come across an elderly couple who are too meek to act and will just grow increasingly despondent as you walk around their house stuffing your pockets with potatoes.

It's a brutally difficult game, and the odds are that all your characters will die before the siege is lifted. And even if you did make it through, was it worth it?