Obrana Ukrajiny

Obrana Ukrajiny (Defense of Ukraine) is a collection of short playable episodes about the Russo-Ukrainian war from 2014 to the present. Each episode covers a different real battle or event, and — which is the most interesting thing about it — each has its own game system, because those historical situations were themselves fundamentally different in nature. The defense of Kyiv plays differently from managing dwindling supplies in Azovstal, which in turn plays differently from the asymmetric drone duel with the Black Sea Fleet.

It's played turn-based, one episode takes five to fifteen minutes, and it requires no reflexes at all. You get a short historical briefing and a clear goal, then you move through a series of decisions where you're almost always choosing between a bad option and a less bad one. The outcome arrives as a narrative sentence, with the mechanical calculation in parentheses right beside it — so you can always see what it was based on. At the end, the game compares your result with how things actually turned out. Alongside the individual episodes, you can also play through a continuous campaign, in which success unlocks offensive situations — or, just as easily, comes down to bare survival.

The author took care that this shouldn't be a celebration of war. For closed battles like Azovstal or Bakhmut, the historical ending doesn't change — only its price does. The graphics can be switched between the original vector drawings and a photorealistic set generated by artificial intelligence; there are no real photographs in the game. The game is available in eight languages including Ukrainian, and is labeled as a prototype whose balance is still being tuned.

Why play it: A rare case of a game about an ongoing war that refuses to let you forget these were real people — and every episode has its own rules, because every battle had its own logic.