Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Through the Darkest of Times.
‘Inexorable corruptions of society’: Through the Darkest of Times.
‘Inexorable corruptions of society’: Through the Darkest of Times.

Through the Darkest of Times review – join the anti-Nazi resistance

This article is more than 3 years old

(Paintbucket Games/HandyGames; PC, Mac, iOS, Android)
This captivating game, in which you coordinate a group of anti-Nazi activists in 1930s Berlin, is an essential reminder of how fascism takes root and grows

The full and final exposure of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime during the second world war inoculated Europeans against fascism’s treacherous appeal. “Lest we forget” became a pledge to not only remember the dead, but to also remain fiercely vigilant for the creeping circumstances that led to those deaths. Four score years on and, with fascism rising across Europe and totalitarian-adjacent behaviour from western leaders (the undermining of the free press; the villainising of immigrants; a government rich on spin, poor on meaningful accountability), it seems the vaccine is weakening. Through the Darkest of Times, a strategy game from a Berlin-based indie studio, seeks to provide a top-up dose.

The game opens in Berlin in 1933, a socially, politically and culturally progressive city laid low by the Great Depression, now the seat of Hitler’s power. You gather a small group of concerned citizens from different economic and political backgrounds, united by their disgust. The game advances in weekly “turns”, in which you must allocate team members to a range of activities – recruiting supporters, gathering funds, buying illicit supplies from sympathetic shop owners or daubing anti-government slogans on the city walls – according to their skills. You then watch as each action plays out. Success will increase your clandestine group’s power and influence, but if you’ve chosen poorly there’s a good chance your members could be spotted, followed and killed.

Watch as each act of resistance plays out: Through the Darkest of Times. Photograph: PR

At the start of each turn, you receive the latest newspapers, which lay out, with meticulous historical accuracy, the party’s inexorable corruptions of society, from book-burning to the boycotting of Jewish businesses, and their effects on the populace. Key historical scenes weave into the narrative, enabling you to play eyewitness to various key moments leading up to the second world war and the Holocaust.

Some comparisons to today’s political events are clumsily pointed (one headline claims that Hitler wants to “drain the swamp”), and there’s an inevitable simplification involved in quantifying the effects of activism and protest into spreadsheet-ready columns. But, by slowing the story to the weekly pace of developments in Nazi Germany (each chapter jumps forward to a new time period, but subsequently progresses in almost real time), the game shows, with sobering clarity, how fascism stepped to the line, crossed it, then marched forward into depravity. The result is the rare kind of essential playing that inspires deep reflection.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed