Through the Darkest of Times (PC) Review

The premise of Through the Darkest of Times is interesting, in that it is set pre-WW2 in the heart of Germany, where Adolf Hitler is rising to power and has the player acting as a sort of resistance leader. By organizing characters, managing resources, and conducting simple missions, the resistance attempts to rally more and more people to its cause to ultimately turn around the fate of the German people. All the while, avoiding getting caught by the police, getting beat up, or killed.

The problems at hand, however, are legion. Stated as simply as possible, this is not fun. Furthermore, the heavy, heavy political slant to the narrative goes far beyond any historical accuracy, and bleeds very strongly over into "real life," with very odd criticisms of modern day politics that come off as lecturing. This revolves around selecting characters to go do simple missions like get more money, stir up sentiment, or buy things. The GUI and menus here are pretty subpar, with the key icons hardly bigger than the mouse cursor, yet large areas of the screen remain unutilized.

On a technical standpoint, the graphics are okay at best with some of the backgrounds, but many of the characters look like stepped-down versions of the Nintendo Wii's Mii characters. About the only thing kind of cool was the newspaper updates with presumably accurate headlines, but given the forced narrative elsewhere, it only serves to illustrate a bad dichotomy. Nuance is a word this game does not understand. For being a game about staying in the shadows, the political message of it is entirely ham-fisted. The main character sees it as their personal duty from day one to stop the National Socialists and Adolf Hitler from gaining any more power. The way the narrative is presented though, is that the group is self-righteously correct on all things, and anyone who resists them is ignorant, hate-filled, or evil.

It leads to very strange encounters such as talking with neighbours or friends who generally support the election/appointment of Hitler - which this game seems to largely ignore the fact his party was in fact elected into power by the most popular margin. They generally hope for the best for the country, while the player's avatar rants and raves at its "friends" in strange moralizing passages with constant proclamations of "Don't you understand!?"

This went perhaps for the lowest fruit, and forgot it still had to try. It is easy to make a 'Evil Nazi' title, after all, Wolfenstein has been doing it for a while. However, for a game that its main thing was a claim of a good narrative, there is little depth to other sides, and the side presented is so self-righteous that this rapidly becomes uninteresting to continue. The regular folks that are interacted with are portrayed as very ignorant, with a very heavy undercurrent of "if they could just see how smart my side is this never would have happened" type narration.

Another odd political aspect to this are the thinly veiled references to modern American politics and Donald Trump specifically. The allusions are hardly subtle, with various mentions of defying the will of the people, using ignorance as a political weapon, and of encouraging hate in the populace to rise to power. These, mixed with the narrative in general results in an endless admonishment of the player. The ever-present question is loosely: how could those ignorant people all around the character let Trump… err, Hitler, get elected? It is now up to them to single-handedly bring their justice to the world.

Again, ultimately the developer took the easy way out. It would have been far more interesting to have some nuance to the characters beliefs (if not on your side, at least perhaps the ignorant civilians) so that the player would think something along the lines of "yeah, I could see why they would think or do that." Instead, far too many interactions are various "don't you see?!" type self-evident virtues which ultimately led to a very strong lack of sympathizing with the main character, as it felt like they would drive away all their friends in real life if they acted this way. For being a resistance member, they are not too smart about being subtle in their speech, or how ironically incendiary their own rhetoric is.

For a game that ultimately is supposed to be about not letting hate win, the amount of hate dripping from each line is clearly visible. The writers have a very clear, seething anger that feels like it is more directed at modern politics, and used the historical backdrop as a way to tell their frustrations. Regrettably, it makes their arguments much weaker as the historical comparisons are reaching at best, and it cheapens both what happened historically and in current times. In the end, it is a paper-thin game tacked onto a political diatribe that most gamers simply don't want to hear and be lectured about.