Through the Darkest of Times Review

Through the Darkest of Times is a game which takes you back in time to 1930s Germany, it also involves a lot of planning, convincing and espionage to complete your plans and make Germany safe again. TTDOT was developed by Paintbucket Games and was published by HandyGames.

TTDOT has you playing as a randomly-generated character. As you watch Germany elect the Nazi party, you work with a small number of resistance members to try to put an end to the Nazi control. You must complete tasks to influence civilians to fight back, these range from holding massive protests to standing up for a local Jewish business. When you complete these actions they will have consequences for your group and can lead to your members being arrested or even sentenced to death.

The paper art style in this title really fits well with the atmosphere, and really does look like it belongs in that era, from everything being black and white to the characters looking the part. Simply put, visually this game does well to pull you in and keeps you immersed for the whole game length. I did find that a combination of the greys from the artstyle and the story does make the overall game feel a bit depressing, which does make sense considering the time period the game is set in.

So what will you be doing in this game? Well you will play as the leader of the resistance, who has been assigned the task of recruiting more people to the resistance and allocating tasks. This is all primarily based on stats. When selecting missions you will get two bars underneath the mission selection screen, which indicates danger and chance of success. There are items that you can bring to these missions to make your chance of failure lower. There aren’t a huge amount of variety of missions, and you’ll mostly be doing the same missions over and over again, but it does make sense that most of your time is spent adding people to the resistance, as you need as many people as you can to join and fight.

The story in Through the Darkest of Times isn’t very long, it took around four to five hours for me to complete the story, however, it does emphasise replayability. You can play the story as a different character each time, each with different stats. You won’t have the same friends as you did in the previous game and maybe these characters are better suited for different missions, so the game does play differently in this aspect. At the beginning of each week you will be greeted by a cutscene, detailing different scenarios and choices you can make. Perhaps your right hand man has lost his job because he’s Jewish, if you can’t pitch in and give him money, he will die and you will lose a companion that could have helped you later in the game. These moments of consequence are what really stands out to me and are what made playing this title so fun.

Overall I really enjoyed my time playing Through the Darkest of Times, the time period was a good setting and it really made me think and appreciate how hard this time was. The gameplay was very fun and I was instantly hooked into the story.