Survival horrors

Well, that was a pleasant surprise. The Kids Aren't Alright was the last song that we were expecting to hear when we booted up the trailer for This War of Mine: Little Ones, but we suppose that The Offspring's classic pop punk single fits pretty darn well. Based upon 11 Bit Studios' survival smash, this game will put you in charge of a group of both children and adults, trying to survive in a war torn city.

You'll need to deal with limited food and medicine supplies, but as the post on the PlayStation Blog points out, "even in times of conflict, kids are still kids". This means that the children will laugh, cry, and play with toys – there's some real potential in this concept, but we're not sure that it's going to be for everyone. "Our goal as developers was to create a mature experience in which you're seeing war through the eyes of regular people," explained senior writer Paweł Miechowski. Bold.

He continued: "We've had this idea from the very beginning of the development of This War of Mine, but we were worried that people may not have been ready for such a serious game. Perhaps even quite a shocking one. But the reception of the game was brilliant – we got tons of positive feedback and acknowledgement for showing war as it was. So the next big step was expanding it by bringing kids to This War of Mine."

The kids will act and behave like youngsters, drawing on the walls of the shelter and conveying the full spectrum of emotions that you'd expect of children. More excitingly, the PS4 version of the game will contain an exclusive bonus shelter named the Large Mansion, which is nice. The title's due out on 29th January, so we should learn a lot more about this harrowing affair in the lead up to release.

[source blog.us.playstation.com]