Attentat 1942

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

Attentat 1942 is a Visual Novel released on PC in 2017, brought to mobile devices in 2020, then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. This game, set in 2001, puts players in the role of a grandson of (fictional, but inspired by real historic accounts) Czechoslovakian grandparents who lived through the Nazi Germany occupation of the country sixty years prior. Players are tasked with looking through documents and interviewing various people to learn about the secret activities their grandfather was involved with during the occupation, ultimately trying to discover why their grandfather was arrested – was he involved in the real-life assassination of Nazi officer of Reinhard Heydrich? Was he caught participating in activities outlawed by the Nazi occupiers? Or was he simply swept up in the backlash of German fury after the assassination, arrested for the crime of being a Czech at a time when Germans were bloodthirsty for revenge and not especially discriminating about their targets?

As one might expect from the topic matter, there’s a lot of potentially triggering elements that this game references and at times dives headfirst into. Racism and the Holocaust, living under a despotic occupying force, the horrors of war… if any of these topics strike a nerve with you, this may not be a game you’ll want to partake in.

For those who do play the game, you’ll find this to be a mixed-media collage of various elements – archival photographs, monochrome character sketches, recreations of period artifacts, and video footage of actors responding to your questions all form an eclectic assortment of elements. Mostly I think this works well enough, but I think the character art here feels out of place, and detracts from the realism that the other elements seem to be aiming for, highlighting these as fictional characters rather than real people.

Beyond this, I think the game works well enough as a mystery game of sorts, except… well, it kinda’ feels like the mystery is a bit of a moot point. The grandfather did eventually get freed from captivity, and it seems somewhat immaterial why he was arrested – he clearly grated with German rule, so it’s entirely plausible that he did something that set them off… but it’s just as plausible that they did it for no reason. And either way, it wouldn’t change what happened, nor make them any more just in imprisoning him.

Of course, the real answer is that this plot is all really just an excuse to give players a look into what life was like in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942, and in that respect this game seems to work well enough as an interactive history lesson of sorts.

So I suppose the question is… do you want a history lesson disguised as a videogame? It’s perfectly valid if you do, and if the setting and time period is of interest to you, I think you’ll find Attentat 1942 to be an insightful look into a rarely talked-about part of World War II, although the fictional story that’s been superimposed on top of that history lesson detracts from it somewhat. On the other hand, if you’re looking to this because you want to indulge in the story and the mystery to be solved, I think you may find it somewhat wanting – the questions you’re seeking answers for don’t really seem to matter all that much, and I think the story is undermined by the constant breaks to look things up in the modern day. Overall, Attentat 1942 definitely has something worthwhile to offer, but I think that what it offers has somewhat niche appeal.

tl;dr – Attentat 1942 is a Visual Novel that puts players in the role of a grandson of Czechoslovakian grandparents who lived through the Nazi Germany occupation of the country, trying to learn about the secret activities of their grandfather and why they were arrested by the Nazis. All of this just seems to be an excuse to give players insight into what it was like to live in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942, and in this the game largely succeeds, though the fictional story elements and forced mystery seems somewhat superfluous as a result. In other words, if you’re looking to learn about this specific bit of World War II history, this may be worth a look. Otherwise, perhaps not.

Grade: C+

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