Most missions contain dangers, but these can be mitigated by being careful about selecting participants and providing them with resources that may increase the odds of success. It involves sending resistance members on missions such as meeting with community leaders, collecting money, and engaging in subversive activities. Maintaining enough morale, supporter numbers, and funds to survive the era is the only real goal, and doing so is relatively simple, even in the more difficult Resistance Mode. Across the 20 or so weeks that compose each era of the Third Reich, players must organize the operations of the underground. While this text-driven, choice-infused storytelling is vital to Through the Darkest of Times, the core gameplay is based in strategy norms. While that may be attributable to a desire for historical accuracy on the part of the developers, the events and choices themselves are usually so insignificant that incongruous details would have no chance of derailing the course of history.

Disappointingly, these choices seem to matter little. Within these narrative segments, players decide how they react to the events around them. The individual segments sometimes feel random and disconnected from one another, but recurring characters and occasional references to past events create a sense of continuity. Players take control of a Berliner involved with the resistance, following the stories of their neighbors and friends. Therefore, Paintbucket Games has made things personal. If that were all the narrative the game contained, it would be educational, but not particularly interesting. This story is told primarily through newspaper leads that share what was occurring in Germany and sometimes wider Europe in each week that the player spends in control.

Few, if any, other games have ever offered such a mature, detailed take on how the war came to be. This same story of propaganda, indoctrination, cruelty, and genocide has been told countless times in countless ways, but it remains compelling here. Through the Darkest of Times foregrounds the development of the Third Reich to create an engaging piece of historical fiction, even though the gameplay is a little disappointing.īeginning when Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933 and concluding with the end of World War II, the game is divided into four eras covering the rise, peak, and collapse of Nazi rule. The parallels to This War of Mine as an account of the civilian experience of war are clear, but developer Paintbucket Games has different ambitions. Through the Darkest of Times is somber - a grim descent into the everyday lives of Berliners trying to survive and resist Hitler’s Germany.

Through the darkest of times review