(At least sometimes it is: the minute details of how This War of Mine unfolds are procedurally generated so that each playthrough is different-successfully infusing the overt structure of This War of Mine, seasonal events activate at predetermined times to a familiar rhythm, with a sufficient variety for multiple playthroughs.
Our father is dead. Sure, why not? After all, supplies are plentiful, and everyone is full and happy. Then someone knocks on the door with a typically confronting videogame moral conundrum such as: Our mother is sick, won’t you please give us some medicine so she doesn’t die a horrible death? P.S. (However, one must prioritise scavenging and the use of scavenged salvage intelligently, or suffer the consequences immediately or perhaps weeks in the future.) And everyone has a full stomach, books to read, fags to suck and Joe to swallow. These nocturnal excursions start simply: there is so much valuable salvage that it is easy to treat much of it as flotsam. The squatters may sleep (in a bed if they have built themselves such a luxury-but only one to a bed at a time), guard the house, or scavenge nearby inhabited or abandoned buildings. With the ransacked supplies the squatters begin to refurnish the house: An ersatz stove? A mattress supported by bricks? Then night falls. The squatters clear away the rubble and ransack the disused house. Closer to The Sims than the Siege of Sarajevo, one directs several (the exact number is procedurally generated) healthy, happy displaced people squatting in a disused house decrepit and strewn with rubble.