Assassination 1942 - A history game in live-action format

On October 31, 2017, the Czech studio Charles Games published a Historical computer game with a contemporary feel. Strictly speaking, Attentat 1942 is the revised version of Československo 38-89: Atentát, which was released in 2015 and is only available in Czech. Since 2017, interested players have not only been able to enjoy languages other than Czech, they can now also enjoy a game that was developed by professors of history and historians. And because that's not enough, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic has also provided extensive funding for the entire project. In terms of content, the game is a big grab bag of historical accuracy, which is brought into the present day through live action sequences.

What did Grandpa actually do during the war?

Prague in the present. You are visiting your grandmother and are finally trying to find the great Mystery of your family: What exactly did your grandfather Jindrich Jelinek actually have to do with the deadly assassination attempt on SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on June 4, 1942? There seems to be no question that he was involved in some way. But Grandma remains silent. And Grandpa? He's in hospital and is unresponsive. So now it's up to you to talk to the surviving witnesses who were once in contact with your grandfather. You will learn numerous details about the Czech resistance in occupied Prague during the Second World War and also more about the Holocaust. After the assassination attempt, your grandfather was arrested and deported by the Gestapo.

Assassination 1942: Live action sequences paired with drawings and historical images

The game awaits you with various game elements that constantly challenge you. On the one hand, you have dialogs with contemporary witnesses who were in contact with your grandfather at some point and reveal new details about the events of that time. If you are told about a specific situation in the past, you can see it in an interactive black and white graphic novel. The whole thing is accompanied by a voiceover, appropriate sounds and suspenseful music elements. You can also make decisions here, which in turn influence how much detail you can learn about the anti-fascist past of your grandparents. If you are too far off the mark with your guess, the passage will be restarted with a "No, wait a minute. That was completely different!". Assassination 1942 cleverly incorporates decisions into this form of dialog to benefit the gameplay, which makes the game feel pleasantly well-rounded. The game even offers you more than just an ending, which invites you to continue the story. to explore more than once.

Teaching history via computer games?

With Assassination 1942 you invite yourself Historically accurate game on the hard disk, whose mission is clearly to impart knowledge. The fact that the soundtrack is exclusively in Czech has both advantages and disadvantages. A clear positive is the authenticity conveyed by the contemporary witnesses, who have not been dubbed. The disadvantage, however, is that as a player with no knowledge of Czech, you have to rely solely on reading the subtitles. It's a bit like watching a movie in an unfamiliar foreign language: as soon as you concentrate only on the subtitles, you lose details of the images. For me personally, this also detracts a little from the replay value, as much as I would have liked to find out what happened in the graphic novel episodes if I had chosen a different option.

Nevertheless, I can recommend Attentat 1942 to anyone interested in history, because it was developed with sound historical knowledge and just as much attention to detail. And especially now, when we are losing more and more of the real eyewitnesses, such a preservation of real events in the guise of a contemporary report is all the more precious. It is at least as exciting that the developer studio Charles Games released a trailer for the history game "Train to Sachsenhausen" on 23.03.2022, which tells of other tragedies of National Socialism in the same style. Anyone interested in these topics should definitely put the studio on their bucket list!