Collaborate or fight? How Gerda: A Flame in Winter forces tough choices
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Narrative games like Don’t Nod’s Life is Strange series force players to make tough decisions that could lead to great outcomes or death. And now it taking that formula and publishing more games that are made from other developers.
The newest is such title is PortaPlay’s Gerda: A Flame in Winter, which came out on September 1 on the PC on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. It’s about a woman in a small village in a historically contested region between Denmark and Germany, and how she struggles to save her husband from the Nazis in World War II.
At the Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany, I spoke about the game with developers at PortaPlay, Hans Von Knut Skovfoged and Shalev Moran. Skovfoged based the story of the game on his grandmother, a half German, half Danish woman who was a resistance fighter in World War II. The game delves into the conflict about fighting the Nazi regime versus fighting individual Germans, who could be part of the family. Sadly, this kind of dilemma is still relevant today, and the game walks players through it.
“We feel the value of seeing human beings, not just seeing stereotyped enemies,” said Skovfoged.
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The game’s art is inspired by a period in modern Danish painting, Danish impressionism, or the Skagen Painters.
Don’t Nod, by the way, recently rebranded itself from Don’t Nod.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Where did the idea originally come from?
Hans
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