I was searching a copse of trees for mushrooms to cook with some millet when I happened to turn around and noticed I'd been leaving footprints behind in the snow. With the black-and-white art of Death of a Partisan, those footprints winding between the trees accidentally composed a beautifully stark image. I didn't have time to appreciate it, because at that moment a German plane started flying overhead and I had to hide.
Death of a Partisan is a singleplayer narrative survival game set on the Eastern Front of World War II. You're a Russian soldier who has recently escaped capture and met with another survivor. The two of you set up in a shack surrounded by wilderness, and while it has an oven and a workbench and a stash of firewood, you'll need to leave it to find food and supplies.
Trudging between ruined tanks and fallen trees, survival isn't my only goal. There's also a band of rebels to meet up with somewhere to the west, and it's this story objective rather than the hunger or cold meter that keeps me going. Death of a Partisan isn't the kind of pure survival game where you punch trees to make axes until eventually you're smelting ore and constructing a fortress. It has an authored world and NPCs with dialogue trees (the writing is by Olga Moskvina, who is part of the Disco Elysium developer diaspora). And while going hungry isn't good for you, it's not going to kill you.
I've had the experience in other narrative survival games of getting involved with the story only to be punished by the survival mechanics, on the brink of death at the end of conversations because I took the time to exhaust an NPC's dialogue options and didn't skip through the audio. So it's good to hear direct from developer Edwin Montgomery after I finish playing this early demo of Death of a Partisan at PAX Australia that the survival elements are there to motivate exploration—perhaps following the footprints of a rabbit in the snow—rather than being part of a hardcore failure loop.
Of course, I still died before actually making contact with the rebels. Near the ruins of a fallen building I saw a soldier limping through the snow and ducked into cover. At which point another soldier shot me from behind, and while I panicked and tried to run around the cover, briefly heading in entirely the wrong direction in a total panic, he shot me again. I died before I even had a chance to apply the bandages I'd crafted earlier.
While the survival mechanics aren't out to kill you, the Germans sure are. You can try to shoot them first, but Montgomery tells me he's planning to design Death of a Partisan so you'll be able to finish the whole thing without killing anyone, using stealth and distractions to bypass enemies instead.
Way back in 2017, Jordan Thomas (whose credits include Thief: Deadly Shadows and multiple BioShocks) told me there's a direct link between survival games and immersive sims, that both genres are about treating a game's setting like a real space and giving players the freedom to express themselves within it. Death of a Partisan feels like a clincher for that argument, a combination of the best of both worlds, and I can't wait to play more of it.
Death of a Partisan is still early on, and it'll probably be mid-2025 at the earliest before it's ready, but you can follow its development by signing up for the mailing list at its website.
