You keep your recruited members and their gained experience, but all your resources-your money, all that paper and paint you'd bought, that precious intel, the medicine, gasoline, bicycles, and so on-are returned to square one.
Aside from a few narrative threads that run through the whole game, and your early choices flowing on accordingly, the start of each act essentially resets the strategic layer. The decisions swiftly pile up over the course of 20 turns and with them comes a growing anxiety that there simply aren't enough turns to get anything done.Īt times I felt like I was drowning. Can you afford to spare someone to tackle a side mission without disrupting your main goal? Meanwhile, you're now running low on funds to get those books printed, so Angelika is probably going to have to ignore that meeting with a British Secret Service contact and instead try to steal new funds from the SA, the Nazi militia. Throwing a spanner in the works, certain actions can also trigger new missions that might only be available for a handful of turns. Constant is the pressure to stop and think about what you realistically have the time and resources to accomplish. If you want to eventually bust a group of prisoners out of a torture camp, you're going to need some brownshirt uniforms, and to get those you're first going to have to do a recon mission. Major missions often have plenty of prerequisites, too. A 20-turn limit is applied during each act, which is nowhere near enough time to do every available mission. Strategic decisions are forced through scarcity. Always the director of operations, never the operative.
You're managing assets and resources-we need two people for this job, a truck and some explosives for that job-and getting the logistics in order becomes the primary focus. After ending a turn you see the results come in: Charlotte managed to get those leaflets printed Arthur collected donations down at the factory but may have been spotted by the authorities Gerhard was arrested while painting slogans on the campus walls. The time periods it visits chart an emotional journey that feels authentic: Disbelief gives way to anger and fear as the truth about the Nazis' goals is revealed suffering and grief lead to the steeling of a righteous fury and finally, glimpses of cautious optimism are tempered by an uncertain future.Įach turn you play your hand, as it were, assigning resistance members to undertake missions across a map of Berlin. The four-act structure skips ahead to 1936 and the Berlin Olympics, to the occupation of France and invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and to the final months of the war, before a brief epilogue in 1946, a year after the Allied victory. Its story begins in 1933 as Hitler's appointment as Chancellor confirms the Nazi party's seizure of power. Through the Darkest of Times is billed as a historical resistance strategy game and plays out akin to a kind of narrative boardgame as you lead a band of as many as five freedom fighters against the Reich. All I knew was that I had to keep fighting, keep surviving, keep resisting, and hope that it would be enough. Frequently, I simply didn't know what to say. There were so many occasions during Through the Darkest of Times that I questioned whether I was doing the right thing or if anything I did could even make a difference. When you're one person trying to resist the Nazi juggernaut in 1930s Germany, your best course of action is not at all obvious indeed, anything you choose to do can often feel futile. At the end of the exchange I have three dialogue options: "There will be better times ahead," "I'm so sorry," and "I don't know what to say." All of them feel devastating and inadequate. But I insist and hand her my grocery list. The woman inside cringes as I enter the shop and warns me the men outside won't like it if I buy anything. They're holding placards that read "Don't buy from the Jews!" and accusing the owner of being a parasite on the German community. I push past a group of brownshirts threatening a Jewish shopkeeper.