Polish company 11 bit Studios is “reimaginging” the civilians-surviving-war game that first propelled it to global success: This War of Mine. This is apparently “not a standard remaster” but a game “designed from the ground up with a multi-year lifecycle”.
11 bit announced the project yesterday in a financial statement alongside its full-year 2025 report. “Alongside the already-in-development Frostpunk 1886 project, the Company announced project P15, which is a reimagining of the cult classic This War of Mine,” the statement said.
“We also know what immense value our existing brands hold,” 11 bit CEO Przemysław Marszał added. “Projects like Frostpunk 1886 or the newly announced P15, which is a reimagining of This War of Mine, are not standard remasters. They represent a fully modern, fresh take on the games that defined 11 bit studios, designed from the ground up with a multi-year lifecycle and long-term community engagement in mind.”
Frostpunk 1886, for reference, is a remake of the original Frostpunk game.
In a follow-up earnings call, Marszał said the This War of Mine game will be made with Unreal engine and is heading for a 2028-2029 release. “We want this game to be ready for new people, for new players, and also with one special exciting feature,” he said, as quoted by Yahoo Finance. “We would like to give something more to existing players and to give them the new experience in This War of Mine. We can’t tell more.
“Even telling that, our marketing goes like, ‘Fuck, guys. Okay, it’s a bit too much.’ We want you to know what we are doing, not to be so closed as we used to be. It’s a This War of Mine IP on Unreal with some cool stuff coming in, and we are currently in the concept phase, and the dev will start somewhere in the middle of this year.”
This War of Mine was released in 2014 and grabbed attention for giving us a wartime experience we don’t often get: war from a civilian’s perspective. This conflict it was based around was loosely the Bosnian war of the mid-90s and the Siege of Sarajevo specifically, though I don’t recall it ever being made explicit in the game. The game itself was presented like a doll’s house, with a side-on view of a multi-roomed shelter that you controlled, along with the handful of civilians living in it. You had to manage their dwindling supplies and send them on risky missions to scavenge more.
You could expand and upgrade the shelter and craft tools and other equipment to better help you survive, but survival in the game was never easy, and it was against this strained existence the game presented you with difficult moral dilemmas. Would you kill? Would you sacrifice? What would you do to survive war? They were profound questions designed to ring loud in players’ ears long after they finished playing, and they became the underpinning themes of 11 bit games thereafter. You can feel them strongly in both city-building survival series Frostpunk and sci-fi survival and cloning game The Alters. The Alters uses a very similar doll’s house presentation for your base, incidentally – the This War of Mine DNA is clear.
Today in 2026, there is no shortage of real-life situations to model a This War of Mine game on, sadly. However, it’s a much more politically charged landscape than in 2014 when This War of Mine came out, so it’ll be interesting to see how 11 bit navigates this. Would the studio be so bold as to use Gaza as inspiration? It’s probably safer, politically speaking, to look to Ukraine, Poland’s neighbour. But is being politically safe what an inherently provocative game should want?
11 bit Studios has ambitious and far-reaching plans besides the Frostpunk and This War of Mine reimaginings, including a new game set in the Frostpunk universe (codenamed P13) and two “completely new, proprietary IPs” (codenamed P12 and P14).
P12 is in the advanced prototyping phase, Marszał said in the earnings call. “It is a very immersive game with emergent gameplay. What is cool about it: this game has a lot of This War of Mine flavor, and we base a lot on that game, on the This War of Mine experience.” The estimation for P12’s release is 2029-2030.
P13, the new game set within the Frostpunk universe, is also set in a new genre. “It’s a new game and a new genre for this IP,” Marszał said, “so it’s no longer a strategy game.” He added that 11 bit is currently in the early prototyping phase but a concept for the project has been accepted. “We love it,” he said. The current plan for P13’s release is 2028-2029.
P14 is a new game by part of The Alters team. It’s “very gameplay-orientated”, Marszał said, and it’s at the end of the concepting phase. The loose release date for this is even further away: 2030-2031.
More immediately, in 2026, 11 bit Studios plans to release the full version of Moonlighter 2 through its publishing arm – which also recently revealed cursed farming game Crop – as well as paid expansions for Frostpunk 2 (the first in June) and DLC for The Alters at the “turn of Q2 and Q3”. Frostpunk 1886 is planned for release in 2027-2028.
