History is written by the victors, so the saying goes. In our current times, where history seems to be rewritten on a daily basis, it’s an important thought to hold on to. Because the truth is never as black and white as it appears in history books, and especially not as biased as it seems on social media. It’s necessary to recognise that history is full of humans and human stories. That’s what I appreciated a lot about The Berlin Apartment before I even dived into the game: it’s here to tell the human side of things.
Most of us are taught in school about the textbook version of what happened during major events like World War II or the divide of Germany into two countries, but what about the people who lived through those events? How did their lives change, and how did they manage to influence things during such unprecedented times? As someone who struggles a bit with seeing things in a very binary way, I find that hearing about the human side of things helps me gain perspective that I otherwise would not have managed by myself. So I’m glad a game like this exists.
In The Berlin Apartment, you play as the daughter of someone who’s renovating the titular flat in modern times. During this renovation, you discover secrets left behind by previous tenants of the apartment, which you, as a curious child, ask your father all about. This leads into four different vignettes, talking about the history of the apartment you’re working on and the people who lived there. With the game set in Berlin, there are a lot of important moments in recent human history to choose from, and I appreciate the choices the developers have made in this respect.
At first glance, it’s pretty unbelievable what the city of Berlin has gone through in less than a century. The changes the city has faced under different governments and the historic events that took place there are all vastly important moments in its past. The game doesn’t give you a big history lesson, though: if you don’t have any knowledge about Europe’s past, things could go slightly over your head. I found this somewhat surprising, as the stories told in the game are ones told to a child, and you’d figure there’d be more context given. But the developers decided to forego any dry recounting of major plot points and rather to focus on the day-to-day lives of the people who were around at that time.
These lives are incredibly varied: from a botanist who can’t find work under communism to the family of a soldier at the very end of World War II. It’s incredibly impactful to see the very same place be the scenery for these different eras, with the outside world dictating what happens within in vastly different ways.
As the player, you are mostly walking around the apartment, usually collecting things that will help you advance the story. This is very much a walking simulator, with the space to walk around being quite limited. Luckily, the stories’ main characters share memories which will inform you about what’s going on outside in an intimate way. All of these people feel real, with events having led up to them being in the situation we find them in, and things continuing to happen to them after we’ve moved on from their story. Despite never seeing another person in these vignettes, you still feel like you’re part of a world that’s alive, where your actions impact others too.
The Berlin Apartment feels like a very relevant game for these times as well. As political news continues to dominate, and the world seems to be heading for more and more madness on a daily basis, it’s interesting to see our world and its events mirrored in what happened in the past. Not that history is repeating in an identical way, but there are parallels to be found without even looking too hard. There have often been questions about what happened in Germany and Europe during those decades and how people could have let this happen, so it’s interesting to see the viewpoint of regular people here. Not what the politicians have to say, or the history books, but the people who had to make their way through life while all of this happened.
It’s slightly frustrating that the pace of the game can crawl to a snail’s pace at times, especially during the longer vignettes, but at the same time, that allows the game to breathe a little bit. You really feel like you’re walking in the footsteps of the apartment’s inhabitants, even if they’re a bit slower due to old age. It makes the heartbreak of what happens to them all the more palpable.
I find it really impressive how the game manages to pack so much history into these short stories. You never spend more than a day in the lives of the game’s protagonists, but you don’t need more than that to get a sense of where they are in their lives or when they are in history. The Berlin Apartment packs a powerful punch, even if it could have done with a little more context for those of us who lack the proper knowledge of European history.
It helps that the visual design of the game is absolutely wonderful. The apartment itself is gorgeous, and seeing the Wall outside of it, or the flags waving in 1933, really hits home how this was more than just a story from our history books: these were real things that happened to real people. The actors portray their characters beautifully too, with understated performances. At times the audio mix was a little bit stilted, with everyone seemingly waiting until another person had finished their line before adding their own, but that’s a minor gripe.
In general, The Berlin Apartment is an important game. In a perfect world, students across the world would play this, as an aside to reading about history from textbooks. There’s something within this game that gets lost when we study history purely from what schools and scholars teach us. Hopefully, it could lead to more empathy across the board, something that seems to have gone missing from modern life.
