Interview - "Monstrous Acts Exist, But There Are No Monsters", How Gerda: A Flame In Winter Shows Us The Uncomfortable Truths Of War

thegamer.com:

Gerda: A Flame In Winter, is an incredibly easy game to get wrong. When we see Nazis in games, we want to shoot them. But in Gerda, you’re forced to live alongside them. You don’t have a gun, and you’re not even a fighter. You’re a nurse living in a German-occupied Danish village whose life in World War 2 consists of minding your chickens and trying to scrape enough rations together to bake a cake for church.

Civilians in World War 2 stories are often either ignored or romanticised, tragically falling for brave, heroic soldiers, or nameless casualties used to add emotional impact. The UK is infamous for looking at its own war past with rose-tinted goggles, coining the term Blitz Spirit to encourage optimism during hardship.

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

For developer PortaPlay, the solution to all of this historical revisionism and negligence was simple: start with the truth.

“I think of my grandma and grandpa, they were resistance fighters near the village of Tinglev,” says Hans von Knut, creative director. “They wanted to fight the Nazi occupation, but not the individual Germans in a uniform because they lived in a mixed population of Germans and Danes. They saw humans, not soldiers.

“This dilemma of wanting to stand up against injustice, but also having moral limits on what you can do, we found this very interesting. Can you balance this? And can you make a difference without using force?”

Gerda, the titular heroine, is Danish and German, so the similarities are immediately obvious. The first characters you’re introduced to are Gerda’s father - a German, and a member of the Nazi party - and her husband Anders - a Danish resistance fighter. You’re left to walk the