CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience

    It is estimated that there are a total of 100 million people struggling to survive on the streets. This number is very sad, but how many of us actually help them or reach out to support them whenever we see them? CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience deals exactly with this issue. As you play, you are deeply affected, and every second you begin to understand better just how hard it is to survive on the streets and your perspective towards the homeless changes. Let's start to examine how life goes for these people who are invisible to most on the streets.

    I want to start by giving general information and then talk about my own thoughts and events you might encounter while playing. In the game, there are five different stories you can play, but rather than story, we can call them personalities. Each has its own background story and illnesses. These are; addict, veteran, poverty, mental illness, abandoned. There are hundreds of possible nightly events and these come depending on your choices up to that point and can change the course of the game. There are over 150 illnesses and traits. You can acquire these depending on how you play.

    Delve Interactive, as both the developer and publisher of the game, says that they will donate 20% of the income from the game to charities focused on homelessness. Also, I want to mention that the research and work they did for the game lasted almost five years. The developers released this game after extensive research on the homeless and their struggles to survive. They say that during the research process, they contacted former homeless people and current homeless individuals to proceed, so the experiences you will live in this game will really give you experiences close to what you would have if you ended up on the street.

     Your only goal in the game is to get a job and rent a house but this is not as easy as you think. You have to start everything from scratch. You have to educate yourself by going to the library so that you can get a job, but you can also earn money by working daily jobs. Daily jobs take up a lot of your time and sometimes they might not even pay you. You have to constantly keep your hunger and happiness high otherwise your happiness will start to decrease and when it is gone, your survival struggle ends too. For hunger, you have to look into trash bins, but the food you eat from the trash can make you sick, so only eat it in emergencies. If you get sick, your hunger drops faster or, if you have money, you buy food or steal it. There is also a hygiene event which affects your happiness. If you get too dirty, your maximum hygiene is reduced by half and to recover, you have to go to the laundromat and have your clothes washed.

    So how do you make money? First of all, as I said before, you can get daily jobs and educate yourself to get a job, but there are many more ways to make money, and these are: you can earn money by begging (if they refuse to give money they might say something to you, then your happiness goes down), you can collect cardboard and bottles and sell them at recycling points, you can make money by playing guitar (this is my favorite). These are the ones I remember, if there are more, you can write them in the comments. By the way, whatever you do in the game, you gain traits related to that. For example, if you beg you gain traits related to begging, if you play guitar you gain guitar-related traits.

    Night events sometimes will make you sad, sometimes happy; you may lose or gain items. While sleeping on the streets you may get beaten up but who knows, maybe you will befriend a dog. Walking on the endless streets, you will encounter other homeless people just like you, some begging, some wanting to sell you drugs. You, on the other hand, will try to stay away from various illnesses or addictions and struggle to survive on the merciless streets.

    I found the game highly successful in every respect: the graphics, the music, the atmosphere it provides, and the lives it portrays. You definitely need to try it, and even if you finish the game, I am sure you will want to play it again because, even though there is only one ending, what matters is how you get there. Since you can take different paths, it is quite satisfying in terms of replayability.