There’s too many games set in the Middle East, and there are/were too many games set during the Second World War. Common complaints, which imply a desire for people to be able to see conflicts beyond the most prominent, but would you ever want to play a game set in a war you’ve likely never heard of?
Farid Hagverdiev, a 19-year-old student at Baku’s State Oil Academy, has developed a game called İşgal Altında: Şuşa, or “Under Occupation”. It’s set during the brief tussle between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 1992, and lets the player assume the role of an Azerbaijani soldier trying to liberate the city of Shusha from the enemy.
It’s pretty rough, as you can see, but it’s interesting for a lot more than it’s stilted knife kills. The game is basically a piece of propaganda. Hagverdiev says “By creating the game we wanted to support the patriotic spirit in our youth, which I hope we accomplished successfully”, and Under Occupation also has the support of Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Youth and Sports.
Azerbaijan: Video Game Revisits Nagorno-Karabakh War [Eurasianet, via GamePolitics]
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