War Hospital, out now, is a tug-of-war between empathy and efficiency

rockpapershotgun.com:

War Hospital, out now on Steam, is about subsisting on the periphery of a war and keeping it firmly off-screen by means of adept time management. Set in 1918, it puts you in charge of a field hospital in northern France, a few minutes drive from the frontline. Here’s how all that works: casualties arrive from the trenches by ambulance or stretcher, and are carried by your medics to a clearing station, where nurses look after them before they’re seen by a doctor. Patients may be lightly or severely injured, but they will all eventually die if they’re left unattended.

You have to triage them so that the most pressing cases are seen first, guesstimating how long it’ll take them to deteriorate based on the UI’s calculatedly imprecise visual language, while also ensuring that your doctors, nurses and medics don’t work for so long that they collapse, which entails a lengthy recuperation period.

Triaging isn’t quite as simple as counting the number of bullet holes on the patient’s hospital card, though that’s the best place to start. Some may have more complicated injuries that use up more hospital supplies, and require longer operations. Others may be VIPs, whom your superiors would like you to prioritise. And all the while, more of them are arriving in a steady flow of writhing bodies on stretchers.

Any patient you accept who dies on the operating table or while in clearing takes a chunk out of your hospital morale, which ends the game when it falls to zero. But you can reduce the morale cut by denying them treatment in advance and letting them expire in the clearing station. Doing this regularly is vital, because there are generally more patients than you have time to treat, but if you do it too often, you’ll earn a reputation for being callous.

The triaging proces is the heart of a cluster of other time and resource management systems. You’ve got to ensure you have various medical supplies and food for staff and patients, whether produced onsite or delivered by