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!

The post Assassination 1942 - A history game in live-action format first appeared on SPIELECHECK | English.

This January day was probably not chosen by chance. You start your journey through this dark chapter of our history in a highly stylized graphic style on the day Hitler seized power on 30 January 1933. You sit together with two like-minded people in Berlin and found a resistance movement with them, which now needs to be nurtured and shaped.

Chance and strategy are your companions

Age, ProfessionThe religion and political views of your character are chosen at random, and you can actively determine their appearance. The game also determines your first two companions at random. And off you go! Now it's time to find like-minded people in 1930s Berlin, collect money, expand your core group, buy paint or paper and paint slogans on walls or print flyers. The individual skills of your group members will determine how successful the actions of your movement are. If your resistance fighter is Catholic, he is more likely to be heard by Christians, while a worker in Kreuzberg will find it easier to reach supporters. However, if your group members are too diverse, this could lead to a dispute that could damage the Cohesion could in turn jeopardize the big picture.

The game is divided into 4 chapters, each of which is turn-based and leads up to key events of the Nazi era - such as the Reichstag fire, the book burnings or the Köpenick Night of Blood. Your aim is to collect enough supporters per chapter so that your resistance movement continues to exist and makes it to the end of the war. The morale of your group is also crucial for this. The further the war progresses, the greater the loss of morale due to general world events. If someone from your core team is arrested by the Gestapo or killed during a mission, this has a massive impact on the morale of your group. So you see, Through the darkest of times requires tactical decisions and at the same time provides you with historical events in which you actively participate.

Authentic and loving game design with minor weaknesses

Despite some repetitive tasks and relatively little variety in the Events in the chapters, the outcome of which is often relatively similar despite different answer options, I have now played the game to the end three times. This is because the randomly generated characters in your resistance group and the larger interim missions that you have to work towards in a targeted manner entice you with details that fill the story with life. If someone in your group is homosexual, they will probably trigger an event in which they are beaten up by an SA group after visiting a gay bar. Jewish comrades-in-arms will have to hide underground, while other resistance members will marry, have children or stab you in the back and betray you to the Gestapo. As you can see, no two runs will be the same. Added to this is the atmospheric music that at the meeting point of your group and, together with the design of the characters, immediately transports you back to the 1930s and 1940s. And I have to say: when I reached the end of the war for the first time, I actually felt something like relief. Not because I was happy that it was over, but because I had the feeling that I had achieved something great with my beloved characters.

Playful history lesson with clear added value

Through the darkest of times conveys an atmospheric picture of Berlin under National Socialism thanks to the real events, locations such as the Moka Efti and the Olympic Stadium and the authentic music. But that's not all: the game was also to his release the first computer game in Germany to be allowed to show uncensored Nazi symbols such as swastikas and the Hitler salute. This is by no means about glorifying an ideology, but exactly the opposite. Through the darkest of times shows the perspective of the resistance and makes it clear in an almost unpleasant way how frighteningly normal it was for the majority of the population to follow National Socialist propaganda during this time. Therefore, despite the points of criticism mentioned, I highly recommend this cleverly put together package of history education!

The post Trough the darkest of times - resisting instead of going to the front first appeared on SPIELECHECK | English.