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Part history lesson, part warn-
ing that history may repeat itself,
the upcoming strategy game
“Through the Darkest of Times” is
driven by news headlines.
One day brings talk of trade
tensions and higher tariffs on im-
ported goods. Another day an at-
tack on a research institute in-
spires debate over whether
LGBTQ citizens should have equal
rights. It isn’t long before immigra-
tion fears begin to dominate, and
stories emerge of closed borders,
protests and then deportation.
Sample headlines: “Trade War
With Czechoslovakia.” “National
Census.” “Boycott of Jewish
Shops.” “Unions Banned.” “Jews
Banned.” “Labor Camps Opened.”
Though set more than 80 years
ago, a sense of urgency permeates
“Through the Darkest of Times”
sparked by our own current events.
Just this month, white suprem-
acist demonstrators clashed with
antifascist counterprotesters in
Portland, Ore.; a top Trump ad-
ministration official said that the
inscription on New York’s Statue of
Liberty welcoming immigrants is
about “people coming from Eu-
rope”; a new federal rule was pro-
posed allowing businesses with
federal contracts to discriminate
against workers based on race, sex,
ethnicity, national origin or
LGBTQ status in the name of reli-
gious freedom. And the president
said that Jews who vote for Demo-
crats show “either a total lack of
knowledge or great disloyalty.”
That last Trump comment set
off a wave of social media posts re-
minding people that before World
War II, the Nazis accused Jews of
being disloyal to Germany.
“Through the Darkest of
Times” paints those who champi-
on Hitler not as unrelatable mon-
sters — the buffoon-like super-sol-
diers of this summer’s “Wolfen-
stein: Youngblood,” for instance —
but as regular people, only with
more hate. Those who oppose are
reasonable, albeit anxious, fearful
and increasingly irritable. We’ll
vote the Nazis out, they say, even as
they wonder if the elections are be-
ing meddled with to the point that
they’re rigged.
The parallels between the early
1930s and today are very much in-
tended by the developers. This is
clear long before a character yells
at a Nazi Party member to leave a
Jewish man alone. “You won,
didn’t you?” he pleads. “Your Ger-
many is going to be great again.”
The game raises multiple ques-
tions around resistance, namely,
how do we do it and what do we tell
ourselves to help us sleep at night?
But it has another query, one
it’s aiming not just at players but at
the game industry and maybe even
all creators: Perhaps the way we’ve
been representing the Nazi regime
in games — and even pop culture at
large — has more often been irre-
sponsible than honest. Does treat-
ing World War II as a game of strat-
egy, or drawing Nazis as pure evil or
violent fools, allow us to remove
ourselves from the conflict — to tell
ourselves, “Those people aren’t
like us and that could never hap-
pen today”?
“It doesn’t start with the Holo-
caust and the war, but it actually
starts slowly,” said Joerg Friedrich,
a co-founder of Paintbucket
Games, the Berlin-based devel-
oper of the title. “It starts with at-
tacks on the media. It starts with
taking over the newspapers. It
starts with shutting down the
trade unions. There isn’t a binary
switch to dictatorship. It actually
happens over time.”
The goal of “Through the Dark-
est Times” is to take players day by
day through the Nazi era, begin-
ning in 1933 when Adolf Hitler is
named chancellor of Germany. It’s
not an attempt to rewrite or pre-
sent alternate histories; instead,
Paintbucket wants to capture
daily life, to show the thoughts and
actions of normal yet politically in-
clined people. It’s not a global bat-
tle but an individual one, a game
about juggling money, morale and
energy to stay emotionally alive
through the end of the war, almost
a decade and a half later.
WWII has long been fertile
ground for fiction, especially in
gaming. As a teen, I dedicated
weekends to all-day sessions of
Axis & Allies, a well-known strate-
gy board game where Germany is
simply part of a faction that moves
around the board; you pick your
team based on the way you want to
play rather than the level of atroc-
ities your chosen country did or did
not commit. This summer saw the
release of “Wolfenstein: Young-
blood,” the latest and most light-
hearted in the modern reinvention
of the well-known action power-
fantasy in which the player mows
down Nazi soldiers.Tough questions
“Through the Darkest of
Times” instead asks tough ques-
tions about how we represent the
most tragic, reprehensible mo-
ments in history. Its characters
have regular jobs — economist,
student, professor — and through
early chapters the war they’re
fighting is often one of awareness.
A casual dinner party can turn
awkward based on conversational
choices, as peers start to believe
government rhetoric that non-
Germans are a threat to their way
of life. Sometimes, to maintain the
health of the player’s peer group,
one must divert funds just to go out
dancing, but even then there’s guilt
at a lack of progress being made.The work comes from veterans
of the big-budget game industry.
Friedrich and creative partner
Sebastian Schulz worked on slick
efforts such as “Spec Ops: The
Line,” a war title that was generally
praised for its balance of heroism
and serious topics. Yet the two still
longed for something smaller and
more authored, a game that would
zero in on the personal costs of war
and would not shy away from tak-
ing a stance.
Friedrich appears increasingly
incensed with games that nod to
topical events but then go out of
their way to avoid grappling with
them. The insistence on the part of
video game publishers that their
works are not political has become
borderline comical. Recently, de-
velopers behind the upcoming
“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,”
which eatures a female Middle
Eastern soldier and a franchise
known for blunt patriotism, as-
serted that their game has no
statement to make.
“We want to present the differ-
ent perspectives. We don’t want to
say that one of them is correct,”
one of the developers told Game
Informer, a point of view that could
be argued is on par with Trump’s
“very fine people on both sides”
line after a white supremacist rally
in Charlottesville, Va., turned
deadly.
The makers of “Through the
Darkest of Times” don’t buy that
perspective. Video games, the de-
velopers say, must be considered
part of the cultural and political
conversation.
“Video games shape the world,”
Friedrich says. “They shape the
way we see the world and the way
we see the world shapes the world.
If I [make] video games about
[WWII], and I omit certain topics
— I omit anti-Semitism, I do not
talk about the Holocaust — then I
basically draw a picture of that era
where these things didn’t happen.
That’s a problem.
“Video games have a responsi-
bility,” he continues. “I would even
go so far as to say that if you think
you should have Nazis in your
game but that talking about the
atrocities of the Nazis would not be
appropriate, then maybe it’s not
appropriate for you to have Nazis
in your game.”
“Listen, ma’am, we were born to
kill Nazis.”
So says one of the twin sisters in
the opening moments of “Wolfen-stein: Youngblood,” which sees the
teen women go on a Nazi-killing
spree. The game never deviates
from that first guns-a-blazing
tone. While recent games in the
“Wolfenstein” alternate-history se-
ries have portrayed Third Reich
leader Hitler as grotesque and pa-
thetic, there’s no indication in
“Youngblood,” set in the early ’80s,
decades after the Allies were de-
feated in the initial WWII conflict,
that the Nazis are after anything
other than world domination.
It’s a missed opportunity, espe-
cially with two female characters in
the lead roles. Perhaps a revenge
fantasy against the extreme mi-
sogyny of white supremacy was in
order? Yet there are no big ideas on
“Youngblood’s” mind. Oppression
is minimal in this good-versus-evil
universe, which presents its bat-
tles as a schoolyard game where
occasionally we hear a Nazi leader
off-screen taunt his soldiers for los-
ing to a pair of “girls.”An alternative
There is a brief moment where
we learn of an alternate history to
“Wolfenstein’s” alternate history,
one where Nazi Germany was de-
feated. But this is brushed off as
less fun than the timeline of the
game, where mayhem and chaos
rule, and Nazis exist as an excuse
for the game to fetishize guns and
sci-fi-inspired war technology.
Talk of the apocalypse garners
a knowing “bring-it-on” smile, and
even an attempt to deal with cli-
mate change is bobbled. Early in
the game, we hear a Nazi radio sta-
tion assure us climate change is a
myth, but environmental disaster
is revealed to be the result of a
Hitler-crafted “doomsday” device.
The result is a message that ulti-
mately says climate change is a
mythand a game in which killing
Nazis takes a conservative route.
The game, of course, is the neg-
ative beneficiary of poor timing.
Having been in development for a
number of years, it’s not “Young-
blood’s” fault for not anticipating
that a mass shooter posting a
manifesto denouncing brown “in-
vaders” would target Mexicans
and Mexican Americans in an El
Paso Walmart or that a con-
tentious protest would lead the
mayor of Portland to express con-
cern for “a rising white nationalist
movement based on white su-
premacy in this country.” Then
days later there were reports of Or-ange County high school students
giving a Nazi salute.
Cartoonish Nazis are a pop-cul-
ture tradition, especially for gen-
erations weaned on “Indiana
Jones” movies or Quentin Taranti-
no’s alternate-history films “In-
glourious Basterds” and “Once
Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.”
Asked, however, if there were con-
cerns about releasing the game in
this climate, or if there were talks
about a greater responsibility be-
cause of its subject matter, a mar-
keting executive for “Youngblood”
publisher Bethesda brushed off
the question. “I mean, it’s a game
about killing Nazis,” says Pete
Hines. “I don’t know how delicately
we have to approach that.”
“Youngblood” itself is simply
upholding a long-standing game-
industry tradition, one in which
major developers pretend they live
in an alternate reality where their
games hold no political or cultural
influence. The Electronic Arts-
published “Battlefield V” essen-
tially scrubbed any mention of Na-
zis from its 2018 WWII game, using
the era more as a setting than a his-
torical document. That game fol-
lows decades of titles that attempt
to avoid cultural discussions by fo-
cusing on war or game analytics.
“That is one way to do it,” says
Friedrich. “And for a pure strategy
game, where it is about war, that’s
the way you might want to do it.
But for us, of course, this is a per-
spective that doesn’t work. The
Nazis were not just another fac-
tion; they were fascist, they were
suppressing people and they
spread their racist, anti-Semitic
ideology. They shifted and
changed the entire society.”
There’s precedent that the seri-
ous approach of “Through the
Darkest of Times” could actually
be good for business. “This War of
Mine,” from Polish indie studio
11Bit, focused on civilian life during
the Bosnian war, and since its 2014
release has sold between 4 million
and 5 million copies across multi-
ple platforms, says the company’s
Piotr Bajraszewski.
“This was a super sad game,” he
says. “It was a depressing game. It
was something totally different,
and so many people played it.”
While successes such as “This
War of Mine” and topical, immigra-
tion-themed indie titles like “Pa-
pers, Please,” give Paintbucket the
belief that its title will find an audi-
ence, there’s also hope it will help
change the dialogue in gaming. A
loud and toxic sector of the gaming
world has taken up many alt-right
talking points, namely the idea
that so-called social justice warri-
ors, feminists and those with polit-
ical agendas are ruining games.
This was behind the 2014 move-
ment known as Gamergate, which
was endorsed by Breitbart News
and flourished on online forums
such as 8chan, linked not only with
the accused El Paso shooter but
with the deadly shootings at two
New Zealand mosques and a syna-
gogue in Poway, near San Diego.
Friedrich says the existence of
“hate and Nazi groups” in the dark
corners of the gaming world solidi-
fied his belief that “Through the
Darkest of Times” had to be made.
It’s a rejection of the idea that
games are not political and a re-
buke to the belief that showing all
perspectives is commendable.
“I want to have a game where
those kind of people don’t feel like
we did it for them,” he says in refer-
ence to Gamergate. “We do it for
other people.”THE VIDEO GAME “Through the Darkest of Times” shows daily life in the early days of Nazi Germany, to underscore how the slow switch to dictatorship can start.
Paintbucket GamesTHE PLAYER
The dire warnings of history
In current political climate,
‘Through the Darkest of
Times’ asks if killing Nazis
can be simply ‘for fun.’
By Todd Martens
“WOLFENSTEIN: Youngblood” has a more typical guns-a-blazing tone when it comes to Nazis.Bethesda