Review: The Darkest Files

I backed this game on Kickstarter a while back, something I haven’t done a lot for videogames. But this one caught my eye, because I love playing detective and it’s roots in true history really resonated with me. At the time I thought this would be my very first video game credit. Little did I know at the time, how things would work out, as I am now working as a game developer!

The Darkest Files is a game set after the second World War. You join the team of Fritz Bauer, prosecuting the many crimes committed during the Nazi regime. All characters, except for Fritz Bauer are works of fiction, but all cases actually happened.

The game presents two real life cases in a puzzle format. Two seems like a very low number, but completing the game still took me about 11 hours. The gameplay is well thought out, you start a case with a bit of background information about it and a single viewpoint. You then get the interview other witnesses to the crime and ask them about what happened. This all happens in a flashback scene of the event. The story unfolds linearly, but you get to ask extra questions by highlighting other objects in the scene.

At some crucial points you’ll be able to interrupt the witness and try to refute their statement. You do this by presenting a certain paragraph in your case file that is linked to what the witness is telling you. If you get it right (and you only get one try) then new information is unlocked which might prove helpful to the case. Although, there is a difficulty setting which might help you, if you go for the lower difficulty then you just need the present the right page instead of the right paragraph.

After you’ve seen all witnesses and gathered all the documents (more get added as days pass and you require more information from witnesses), you can then start recreating the crime on a blueprint. The cases is divided in 5 parts, for each of these parts you have to place all actors in the correct room and assign a person to an action. For example, you might have to determine who made a phone call, so you place the marker for that person in the correct room and assign it the action “Made phone call”. You do this for all 5 parts. Then you have to dig through your case files, and back up your claims by highlighting the correct paragraph in 3 different documents to present your conclusion.

Once you’ve done all your prep work, you take your case to court and present your findings, if you’ve done a good job, you’ll pass with flying colours. I didn’t. In my first case, I missed three conclusions. In my second case I missed one. I did however had a bug in my first case where I didn’t get any retries for failed conclusions (you normally get 3 or 4 retries, I can’t remember). The game did succeed in not making me feel stupid, it was challenging, I got some stuff right and the feeling for getting something right trumped the letdown of not knowing what to provide to prove my point when I got something wrong.

The puzzles and gameplay were excellent, I don’t have any remarks there and wholeheartedly recommend the game for this aspect alone. However, there are some points that made it somewhat harder to enjoy the narrative. The voice actors are all German, but the in-game voice is English. Which lead to a lot of mispronunciations, not to mention grammatical mistakes. I’m sure this is a minor point for most, but it really affected my immersion. I think I would have preferred German voices with English subtitles.

The only other point of critique on the voice is the blending of different voice lines. Imagine two characters talking:

“I’m not sure that…” said A.

“Hold it!” Shouted B.

When you read this, you expect B to interrupt A. What happens in the game is that both voice lines are seperated by a long pause. As if there’s some kind of technical issue preventing from voice lines from being played immediately. This really grinds the narrative to a halt. What was supposed to be a tense moment is completely lost on the player. This is a shame, because the writing of the cases in the game is great, but doesn’t get to shine either because of these issues are because of voice actors being forced to speak in a non-native language.

The visuals of the game are stunning. I loved the aesthetic, it really helped solidify the game’s narrative to the historical setting. It seems almost a shame that I should bring up a piece of critique on the visuals, because it’s so minor in comparison to all the lovely work that has been put into it. But I guess that’s what you do in a review, so here goes. Most of the game you’re set in a fixed point of view toward other characters. So you don’t really notice that most of these are actually 2D sprites. Except in the court room, for some reason, most of the time in the court room consists of many different camera angles and moving shots, which leads to a real jarring effect when you see the 2D models slightly sideways. It would be fine if this was part of the aesthetic of the whole game, but here it feels very out of place.

Last point is about the ending of the game. After finishing the two cases, there’s an epilogue. In the epilogue some of the story that has been sprinkled in on the side during the main two cases come to a head. Except, not. It’s so very anticlimactic I wonder what the point was. There’s a choice you have to make, which should feel meaningful. And it did at the point of making the choice. But there was no follow-through. You made the choice, but you didn’t get to see any of the consequences. What was the point in making that choice then?

So, play the game for the detective work and the puzzles. They are really, really good. Not to mention that both cases are real. The game doesn’t dwell a lot on the horrors of the holocaust, but does dig deep in the surrounding events of the holocaust. The game serves as a great reminder to the many atrocities that have been committed at the time.

At the very end of the game, you’re presented by a quote by Fritz Bauer that I’d like to share, because it rings so true. It’s very easy to go with the pack, saying things are out of your hands. Whereas his comment clearly is linked to the events of the holocaust, it can be applied to many things. My personal pet peeve is climate change. It’s easy to shove the blame on other people, corporations or governments. And it might even be true. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. Small things like not opening the tap fully, but adjusting the handle to use a smaller stream does have an impact. It starts with you.