What’s up in a Kharkiv bomb shelter – a look at the horror, humor, and humanity of life under bombardment – is our Indie Game of the Year for 2022.
CONTENT WARNING – WAR, SOUNDS OF EXPLOSIVES, DEATH
This game gives you a brief, but emotionally powerful look at life in a bomb shelter. Created by developer Dahuanna while they were stuck in a bomb shelter in Ukraine during the Russian bombardment, it aims to give players a glimpse into the various reactions people can have while living through such an event. Some cannot stop looking at the news. Others are finding their personal problems have gotten far, far worse. Some just want to be able to use the bathroom in peace. And one person is very happy to have their guitar.
The emotions don’t surprise me. I’ve wondered what the people suffering under these conditions must have felt like. Dahuanna knows first-hand, and has created an experience in walking around and talking to people about how they feel. This connection to a group of people undergoing those emotions feels so much more affective than simply thinking about the situation, though. There’s something about the flame-like walls that constantly surround you, the gentle guitar punctuated by the shrieks of falling bombs and nearby explosions. Just talking with people when it feels like, at any moment, the whole place could explode, killing or trapping you. It’s surreal and terrifying, creating an emotional numbness that only gets broken up by stinging moments as you feel a hint of this reality that the people must have felt in living through this.
One character mentions a sense of their mind having shut off their reactions to it all, and from this brief game, I felt a sense of it. It was like the emotions were not there, simply acknowledging while only sometimes letting you feel the slightest hint of the full horror of what these people had been feeling. It’s harrowing and exhausting to experience, even though it’s only a few minutes long, but in this brief snapshot you get the tiniest sense of what these people had been going through. That it can strike so hard and devastatingly in such a short time, and through the distance of experiencing it through a fictional medium, creates this empathy with the people suffering under Russia’s attack burn all the more. This is a hint of a hint of what these people are feeling. A whisper compared to an ear-rupturing roar. Whatever you feel for people suffering under war, this game will amplify your rage toward warmongers and your compassion to those suffering under them.
This call to care more for people suffering under war and cruelty – this experience that makes us feel the smallest hint of their pain and struggle for humanity in the darkest of times – makes this game our Indie Game of the Year for 2022.
What’s up in a Kharkiv bomb shelter is available now on itch.io.
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