Hollow Home Is A Survival RPG About The Civilian Cost Of War

War games usually give players some form of power. You are handed a weapon, placed in control of a squad, or asked to make strategic decisions from far enough away that cities become objectives on a map. Hollow Home removes that distance completely. There are no guns, no battles, and no fantasy of becoming the person who somehow turns the tide. Instead, you are a 14 year old boy trying to survive while the city around you is slowly destroyed.

Developed by Ukrainian independent studio Twigames and published by Crunchy Leaf Games, Hollow Home is a narrative survival RPG inspired by real events surrounding Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine and the siege of Mariupol. Players take control of Maksym, a teenager whose story begins on the last ordinary day he will remember. His city is still intact, people are continuing with their lives, and the idea that everything could change overnight still feels impossible. By the following morning, that normal life is gone.

That perspective immediately separates Hollow Home from most games about war. Maksym is not a soldier and cannot solve his problems through combat. His survival depends on where he goes, who he trusts, how he spends his time, and which people he chooses to help when he cannot help everyone. Every day becomes an accumulation of small decisions made under circumstances no child should ever be expected to navigate.

Survival Means Deciding What Matters Most

The absence of combat does not mean Hollow Home is removing conflict. It simply moves that conflict into conversations, relationships, and decisions where there may not be a satisfying answer. Maksym meets other people struggling to survive, and those connections can determine what opportunities appear later, who remains willing to help, and how different stories unfold. Talking to someone is not just an opportunity to collect information because the words you choose can alter the path ahead.

That makes relationships one of the most important resources in the game. Food and shelter obviously matter in any survival story, but people can become just as essential when everything familiar begins collapsing. Someone Maksym helps early on might later provide support when he desperately needs it, while ignoring another person could close off a path entirely. The difficulty comes from knowing that time and resources are limited, so caring about someone does not necessarily mean you will be able to save them.

That distinction is important because Hollow Home is clearly interested in the moral exhaustion created by impossible choices. Players are expected to prioritize, sacrifice, and eventually accept that some consequences cannot be undone. You might know exactly what the compassionate choice would be but lack the time or resources to make it. Another decision may help Maksym survive while leaving someone else in a worse position, turning a seemingly practical choice into something much harder to live with afterward.

The comparison to Disco Elysium makes sense when looking at how much weight is being placed on dialogue and character interaction, while the influence of This War of Mine is obvious in the focus on civilians surviving conditions they never chose. What makes Hollow Home different is Maksym’s age. The person being forced to make all of these choices is still a child, which changes the emotional weight of almost every situation around him.

The City Changes Alongside Maksym

The city is not simply a backdrop for the story. It changes as the siege continues, with three districts becoming progressively more damaged and dangerous over time. Places that were accessible earlier may no longer be reachable, familiar buildings can disappear, and people Maksym expects to find may suddenly be gone. That transformation turns exploration into something more unsettling than uncovering another section of a game map.

There is something particularly effective about allowing players to see the city before everything changes. Beginning with an ordinary day establishes a version of the world that can later be remembered. A street is not simply rubble because the player saw what stood there before. A missing neighbor is not an anonymous casualty because there may have been a conversation with them when life still felt normal.

That sense of memory could become one of Hollow Home’s most powerful tools. Destruction in games is often impressive because of scale, but it becomes much harder to ignore when the player has an emotional relationship with the places being destroyed. Watching a familiar district change day after day means experiencing the loss gradually instead of arriving after everything has already happened. The player understands what disappeared because they were there when it still existed.

It also reinforces how little control Maksym has over the larger situation. The city keeps changing regardless of what he wants. Streets become unsafe, resources become harder to reach, and the people around him are forced to adapt. The game is not asking whether the player can prevent the war from happening. It is asking what kind of person Maksym becomes while surviving it.

Hollow Home Comes From Developers Living Through The Same War

The context behind Hollow Home makes its subject matter impossible to separate from the people creating it. Twigames is based in Kyiv, and development began in spring 2022, only weeks after the full scale invasion of Ukraine began. Founder Valerii Minenko has explained that the project initially became a way for the team to process what was happening around them while they were still living through the war themselves.

That gives the game a perspective that cannot simply be recreated through research from a distance. The developers have continued working on Hollow Home while dealing with the same larger conflict that inspired it, while also researching accounts from people who survived the siege of Mariupol. The goal is not to recreate one person’s exact experience through Maksym, but to communicate something about what war means for ordinary families who remain in their communities and try to survive another day.

That distinction matters with a project like this because using real tragedy as the foundation for entertainment carries obvious responsibility. Everything shared about Hollow Home suggests the developers understand that. Combat has not been added simply because games are expected to have it, and survival is not being treated as an excuse for power fantasies. The game instead focuses on the mundane, human parts of catastrophe that are much harder to reduce to victory and defeat.

A conversation can matter. Choosing where to spend an afternoon can matter. Deciding whether to help someone can matter. These are not dramatic battlefield decisions, but they may be much closer to how people actually experience a crisis when they are trapped inside it.

A Survival Game Without A Hero Fantasy

The phrase “survival RPG” can suggest crafting systems, enemies, weapons, and increasingly powerful equipment. Hollow Home appears to be stripping that familiar structure down to something much more human. Maksym is not becoming stronger so he can eventually overpower the situation. He is learning how to endure it, and those are very different ideas.

That could make the multiple endings particularly meaningful. Branching questlines and changing relationships mean the story is shaped by dozens of choices rather than one obvious decision at the end. The outcome should reflect the person Maksym became, the people he stayed connected to, and the sacrifices made along the way. Replaying the game may therefore be less about finding the “correct” ending and more about discovering what happens when different people become your priority.

There is also something uncomfortable about the idea of replaying these choices with knowledge from a previous run, which may be entirely appropriate. Knowing that someone will need help later could change how you treat them earlier. Understanding what happens to one district might make another destination suddenly more important. Like memory itself, knowledge changes how the same events are experienced the second time around.

That is what makes Hollow Home stand out. It is using familiar RPG ideas such as relationships, branching quests, exploration, and multiple endings, but placing them inside a story where survival does not come with the promise of triumph. Sometimes getting through another day is the victory, even if it comes with consequences Maksym will carry long after that day ends.

War games have spent decades showing us what conflict looks like through soldiers, commanders, and battlefields. Hollow Home is interested in everyone who does not get to leave when the fighting begins. By focusing on a teenager trying to navigate a city under siege, Twigames is telling a much smaller story, but that smaller perspective may ultimately say far more about what war actually takes away.