Countless video games depict the second world war. Most guide players towards the battlefield, with its widescreen explosions and opportunities for sharpshooting heroics. Few head for the death camps. The video game medium is perhaps seen as too playful, too flippant, too lowbrow to approach the 20th century’s looming vortex of atrocity.
The Light in the Darkness, a new game available for free as an educational tool, follows a an émigré Polish Jewish family – a husband and wife and their son – living in France during the Nazi occupation. It does not make it as far as the gas chambers; the camera pulls away at the point at which the characters board the train. But there is no doubt as to where the tracks lead.
This is a storybook kind of game, played out in a doll’s house-like representation of a Parisian apartment into which we peer and eavesdrop, occasionally nudging the characters towards their next dialogue trigger point, or partaking in the odd simple minigame. There is little agency here, and for good reason: the designers surely did not want to imply that a victim who made different choices might have spared their own lives. But still, by interspersing the cartoonish graphics with documentary evidence – scanned documents, archival footage of the raising of the swastika-bearing flag over French civic buildings, Nazi officers climbing the Eiffel Tower – we grow close to the fictional family, while remaining aware that the events portrayed in the game are rooted in fact.
The sentimental soundtrack is unnecessary; even in its rudimentary design, the game succeeds in conjuring the melancholy and fear of those caught in the snare of a grand and terrible geopolitical history. Is this the clearest or most affecting Holocaust fiction yet written? No. But at a time when one in 10 US adults under the age of 40 have never heard the term “Holocaust”, all works of commemoration feel not only welcome but urgent and necessary – and The Light in the Darkness reveals a path other developers may still follow.
