I.T. Kid

Red Cross ERU is YoudaGames' simulation of a Red Cross emergency response unit, made with the help of Red Cross specialists. You run a base camp while a disaster unfolds around it -- an earthquake, a drought, a flood, a conflict -- and the game keeps asking the same question: with too few people and too little time, what do you do first?

The camp is a map of tasks. Reports arrive from the field, the clock at the bottom of the screen counts the days and hours, and every job needs a team and a vehicle to reach it: doctors' posts and hospitals, volunteers, and relief, water and sanitation, engineering and protection teams, carried by trucks, jeeps, helicopters and planes. Sent out, a unit works on its own, so the game is about priority rather than reflexes -- which village, which injury, which load of supplies -- and the eleven missions grow from that one decision.

The tutorial takes the first call step by step, from the medical unit and its land cruiser to the tasks board where the jobs are listed and the GO THERE arrow that sends you to the next one. It looks like a diagram of a relief operation seen from above, all tents, roads and terrain, and the stakes are the game's own: the order you choose is the whole of it.