Gerda: A Flame In Winter Review - A Brutal Game In A Beautiful Package

thegamer.com:

At the start of Gerda: A Flame In Winter, you’ll lose friendship points with your dad because you’re annoyed that he’s joined the Nazi Party. Gamifying war is bizarre at the best of times, but Gerda throws you into the deep end, and this makes for an uncomfortable start to a game that will get much darker than this.

There’s nothing offensive with what’s taking place, but it’s hard to see such a conversation played out so casually, let alone turned into a game for our consumption. Too many conflicts already have been. Perhaps we’re all numb to the countless depictions of war in first-person shooters, and how many action games have us shoot at brown people as a white protagonist invading their country, but approaching war through the calmness of an RPG is a tonal dissonance in and of itself.

Related: How Gerda: A Flame In Winter's Developers Explored The Grey Areas Of War And Nazi Rule

But just an hour in, it becomes overwhelmingly apparent that Gerda is the only way a World War 2 story should be told. The RPG conventions and game mechanics quickly blur into the background as Gerda pulls you into its watercolour melancholy, living the story of the titular heroine fighting for her husband’s freedom from the Gestapo.

And by the time the credits roll, you realize that the RPG mechanics aren’t there for you to master. They’re there to give you the feeling that you are both in and out of control - and what better way to portray that than with dice rolls and stat checks?

You play as a young woman called Gerda who is half German, half Danish. You live in a town that, before the war, was recently liberated from the Germans. Now in 1945, it is under German rule once again, causing a bitter divide. Life is hard, but quiet, as it