You burst into the apartment and the occupants, an older couple, turn towards you, terrified. "Are you going to kill us?" the man quickly asks. You pause at the door, surveying the room for useful items.

"Are you going to kill us?"

This was once a lovely home. Antique book cases line the walls; there are comfy armchairs, a huge stone fireplace. But the city is disintegrating and this place is dark and wretched now. You need medicine and the couple say they haven't got any so you beat the husband. He yells to his wife: "Get away, hide," but you bludgeon him unconscious and then you go for her. Somewhere outside the battle has been going on for weeks. You are tired and desperate. A blackness is upon everything.

This War of Mine is a startling strategy game from Warsaw developer 11 Bit Studios. Set in an unnamed city amid a modern military conflict, it gives the player control over a group of civilians as they attempt to survive from one day to the next. Each night, you must direct the strongest members of the party out into the streets to scavenge for food, medicine and other useful goods. How they get this stuff is up to you: bartering, stealing and murder are all possible. But there is danger everywhere – from snipers to other civilians to the diseases that come when cities break down. The one thing you don't do is pick up a gun and fight back.

'Civilians are score mechanics'

Most war games are about the unquestioning excitement of military action. Call of Duty, Battlefield, Sniper Elite … none of them really challenge the violence they depict or wonder what it must be like to live amid this madness – they are about soldiers fulfilling their destiny as heroes, whatever the cost. In these fantasies, civilians are only ever tests of the player's target acquisition skills. Shoot a bystander in Call of Duty and you fail a mission. Humans are reduced to scuttling score mechanisms.

But some game designers have started to think about conflict in a different way, and from different perspectives. Last year, Lucas Pope's clever strategy title Papers, Please allowed players to become border crossing officials in an eastern European country, deciding who got in and who didn't based on an endlessly reconfiguring set of official passport criteria. You had to process as many people as possible to earn money to feed your family, but this often meant treating these anonymous masses like cattle. Tense, challenging and darkly humorous, the game told us more about the casual evil of oppression than a hundred first-person shooters ever could.

This War of Mine was inspired by a magazine article entitled One Year in Hell about a city blockaded during the Bosnian war. "If there is no water, no power and no pharmacy to get drugs for your sick wife, what do you do? You struggle for it," explains the senior writer, Pawel Miechowski. "You trade for it, or your steal it because you have to. We did not set the game in any particular city, because when society breaks down it doesn't really matter if you're British, Polish or American: we're all the same species when we're struggling for food."

Using a simple point-and-click interface, players can collect items and build useful stuff like beds, radio transmitters and rain water collectors. Each member of your small party has different skills, but also their own weaknesses. They may be sick or injured, or they may have small children to care for. Some can't cope with hurting others – send them out to batter an old couple for medicine and they may return haunted by grief and guilt. The next night, they'll refuse to go anywhere, sitting in the darkness, hugging their knees and crying.

This is a game about the psychological mechanics of survival – what are we prepared to do to help our loved ones, and what price will it exact? "There are no good or bad decisions, it is all morally grey," says Miechowski. "You'll often have to sacrifice someone to save someone. It will create terrible remorse, but this is what people deal with in war."

Personal drama within global conflict

Recently funded through Kickstarter, Sunset is a very different take on a similar concept: civilians coping in a city torn apart by military conflict. Developed by Belgian studio Tale of Tales, the game follows immigrant Angela Burnes who travels from the States to a troubled Latin American country just as a bloody military coup takes place. Now trapped in an occupied city, she takes on a job as a housekeeper to mysterious bachelor Gabriel Ortega. Burnes gets one hour every evening to investigate the apartment, learning about her employer. Is he part of the resistance movement? Could she persuade him to get involved?

Tale of Tales describes Sunset as a first-person exploration game in the style of experimental indie titles Dear Esther and Gone Home. But the game is also a confrontation of typical first-person shooter conventions.

"In the beautiful first chapter of Half Life 2 you get chased by policemen," explains Tale of Tales co-founder Auriea Harvey. "On your route, at some point you jump into someone's apartment. You don't get much time to contemplate the situation but on the bed is a couple, a man and woman, embracing each other in fear. They look at you, not as the savior that the game pretends you are, but as someone who has violently disturbed their privacy. We thought: "Why can't I play those people? Instead of this Gordon Freeman character." The couple on the bed seemed so much more complex, and interesting, and real, than the hero of the game. Ever since then we've been dreaming about making a videogame about people like them."

In this game then, the military story – the Battlefield story – is happening elsewhere, outside the windows. Tale of Tales want players to understand what it feels like to be trapped within it. There is no narrative arc as such, no win state, but the player can influence the actions of Ortega, build a relationship with him, and maybe imprint on the wider conflict. The point is the experience.

"We want to know how we would feel in such a situation," says co-founder Michaël Samyn. "It helps us understand the world, understand people. The game doesn't tell a story in the sense that it shares a message or makes some sort of declaration. Any conclusions that you draw from the game are your own. We just want you to think, to live through this a little bit. We seldom get the opportunity to imagine being somebody else, somewhere else. Definitely not to the extent that videogames allow us to. And it's so important."

How games can challenge the idea of war

For years, films and literature have explored the desperate lives of those caught up in wars; the civilians, the refugees, the victims. Games have struggled in the past, but now smaller independent studios are producing beautiful, interesting, shocking titles that challenge the orthodox military messaging of mainstream shooters – and they can freely distribute them via the web. Importantly too, they are finding a willing audience. Tale of Tales is unashamedly an arthouse studio, its previous titles have been avant garde experiments, often described or dismissed as "notgames". But when the studio launched its Kickstarter appeal, it attracted more than twice the funding target.

There is a growing realisation that games can be used as a medium to challenge, to ask difficult questions and to help us understand the world from different perspectives. This May, the first ever News Game Hackathon was held in Cologne; newspaper journalists from all over Europe were invited to join small teams and, over the course of two days, make games based around current affairs stories. Various international media companies took part, including Deutsche Welle, Le Monde and the Guardian.

The news game creator Tomas Rawlings of Bristol studio Auroch Digital was a guest speaker. "In the past few years games have grown in scope as new voices use the form to talk about war," he says. "First Person Victim turns Call of Duty on it's head, giving you the experience of being in a war zone but as a civilian, not soldier. With our game NarcoGuerra we used the conventions of games like Risk and the idea of the 'War on Drugs' to present what seems to be a war game, but one that actually has a very different way to end the conflict – via politics. We explored similar ideas with Endgame: Syria where you can win the war but lose the peace – as seems to sadly be happening in reality."

"While non-gamers may only see the occasional tabloid story about some first-person shooter, within gaming we're having a much more nuanced look at human conflict; we're now using the established conventions to question both war itself and how it is represented."

In This War of Mine, you could have bartered with the old couple, you could have ransacked the house, taken the supplies and left them to recover. At that moment, in that room, in one fascinating game, no one had to die.

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