Is it right to turn histories that touch on genocide and totalitarianism into games? Is the very act of play a direct contradiction to the seriousness of political history?
In The Berlin Apartment, you explore a series of interlinked vignettes where cosy games are turned into serious commentaries on the dark history of the city. This short narrative driven game explores the history of Berlin through the people who live in an apartment over one hundred years of history, uncovered as Malik and his daughter Dilara renovate the apartment in the modern day. As they uncover the layers of the apartment, so they uncover its stories. In doing so, the game explores the power of stories to construct our histories, and ourselves.
Berlin has had a tumultuous history, and the chapters here cover the rise of fascism, the division of East and West Berlin, and hints at the modern refugee crisis. As someone who has family that lived through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, I connected with the subject matter in the game. Each vignette takes around 30 minutes to play, and with a total play time of around three hours, it won’t take you long to get through the stories within.
In covering a different section of history, each segment takes on its own style and gameplay. Each chapter has light gameplay elements that support the narrative, from a paper plane throwing simulator to a packing game. The mechanics on the throwing games are a little unintuitive, often having to aim higher than the throwing location when trying to send rubbish down a chute or get the paper plane across a wide avenue of turbulence.
You might wonder what these seemingly unrelated games have to do with some of the most perilous moments of history. When I took genocide studies at university, the professor insisted that no narratives of genocide should be funny; The Berlin Apartment does not look for humour in these segments, but there’s an implication that playing a game with history might have elements of fun. Some might say the cartoonish style and casual mini-games don’t match the serious themes within the story, but I think this engenders more empathy with the characters.
The developers succeed in treading this fine line, especially in the chapter on 1933. Here, a light packing game is turned into something more terrifying as you come to understand why the character is packing. In the third chapter, decorating the apartment for Christmas takes a brutal twist
With these mixed genres and styles, the game sometimes struggles with consistency. The guardrails of the game’s setting in a single apartment mean that the characters are never truly threatened, even in the first chapter when, to my terror, you have to throw a paper plane into a guard tower! But when The Berlin Apartment hits the high point of this storytelling in the 1945 chapter, it really hits hard.
Spoilers ahead
In the chapter Silent Night, set in 1945, a young girl decorates the crumbling apartment with home made ornaments. It’s Christmas, but it’s clearly cold, and the family within are visibly poor. We garner our empathy for this young girl, because she is longing for her father to come home at Christmas, much like the girls in Little Women. This is a familiar story to many players.
But when she goes out into the wreckage of the apartment to search for more decorations, we realise that her father was a member of the Nazi party and isn’t coming home. This was expertly done; too many pieces of media try to gain empathy for why someone would support a totalitarian state. But here, the girl is innocent; she is a victim of history and her father’s choices. The moment is deeply moving, and speaks to a larger national conscience that generations of Germans had to deal with members of their family being members of the Nazi party. After this revelation, decorating the tree with broken remnants of the fascist state takes on a deep pathos.
Spoilers finished
These casual games are usually the domain of the cozy, but here they become something else. And this is representative of the apartment itself. Our homes are meant to be safe and warm, but sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are houses of loneliness, cages of fear, and crumbling ruins. Sometimes they are palaces and prisons of the imagination. And sometimes they are a place for a fresh start.
Within these themes, I would have liked to see more development of Malik and Dilara’s story about finding home in Berlin, as it beautifully counterpoints Jozef Lieberman’s story in 1933. What we do know about these characters is told through their interactions in the apartment between chapters, as the apartment becomes progressively renovated.
Overall, there’s a question of whether these stories are real or whether they’re fictions of Malik’s imagination to keep his daughter entertained while they work. But the game addresses this, both to the characters and to the player. Malik says:
When you make up a story, you’re always taking on a bit of the person you’re telling the story about!
This empathy is the point of the game. Dilara wants to be reassured after every story that the people in it were okay, but in fictionalising history, we know this isn’t always the case.
The Berlin Apartment is a gentle and personal game about complex historical issues. For game writers, playing with history can be like playing with fire. But if we do it responsibly, with empathy and deep understanding, that shines through the work. Those who are willing to sit with these stories and listen will be rewarded by their empathy.
These stories weren’t unexpected. But if you are less familiar with German history, you might come to a greater understanding of the dark periods of Berlin’s history through the eyes of its residents.
By focussing on personal stories at key moments, we gain a deeper understanding of how oppressive systems affect people on a day-to-day level. It’s a reminder that when writing about history to include details of the people who experienced it. As players, we connect more when history is personal. The Berlin Apartment wants us to develop our empathy: for those around us, especially for those who might be different to us, so that these histories don’t happen again.
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