WARSAW

Publisher: Pixelated Milk · Creator: Marcin Sergiusz Przybyłowicz, Michał Śledziński

Anecdote

Released in October 2019 by Polish studio Pixelated Milk following a successful Kickstarter campaign, WARSAW transposes the mechanical grammar of Darkest Dungeon into the Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944. The player recruits, equips and deploys a team of four Armia Krajowa insurgents on missions to recapture districts of the Polish capital under German occupation. Director Tomek Tomaszewski and writer Karol Madaj consulted the archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum and gathered testimonies from survivors to reconstruct the sixty-three days of fighting. Each mission, lasting between fifteen and thirty minutes, offers turn-based combat in streets, sewers, ruined buildings and barricades, against SS patrols, Volkssturm and RONA collaborators. The combat system requires the precise positioning of fighters on four adjacent tiles, each according to their specialisations — medic, marksman, liaison agent, improvised bomber. Between missions, the player manages their underground hideout: morale, wounds, equipment and the recruitment of new insurgents inspired by attested historical figures such as Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński and Wanda Traczyk-Stawska. The art direction in watercolour and charcoal draws on the paintings of Wojciech Kossak and the photographs of Eugeniusz Lokajski. The soundtrack by composer Marcin Sonnenberg, punctuated by Polish patriotic hymns, reinforces the gravity of the subject matter. The title, partly supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture, is used in certain Polish schools as a teaching tool. It brings to the world's attention an episode often obscured by Cold War diplomacy.