I would never have heard of this were it not for a review of it randomly showing up on my front page here. I became briefly obsessed with the reviewer, someone who would give 1 stars to an educational game about the horrors of the Holocaust because “there were periods after every name in the credits” and “the name of the game doesn’t make sense”. I spent like an hour going through their letterboxd (linked on their profile, i’m not that insane) howling with laughter, a highlight being a 5 star review of Idiocracy “this movie is a perfect depiction of today’s society” literally immediately followed by a 2.5 star review of The Irishman which they only watched half of because it was too long, immediately followed by a 5 star review of Jackass Forever (other 5 stars include Thomas & Friends: The Great Discovery - The Movie and Pirates of The Caribbean, which they haven’t seen but liked the world in Kingdom Hearts 2).

Anyway, is this game good? No. Is it an effectively educational experience? Also no. Does it have an easy platinum trophy? Yes. And in a way, doesn’t that make the holocaust all worth it?

Completely outstays its welcome and ends up a bloated mess of collectibles and bland dungeons. I was mashing the skip button by the end.

There’s no way to talk about this without sounding like a piece of shit, so I should preface it by saying it didn’t “bother” me, but I did find it increasingly hilarious every time I met a new POC character, which is practically everyone. This is set 100 years before the Harry Potter stories so I kept wondering what happened in the intervening years to make Hogwarts so white. Reverse great replacement theory.

Some of the voice acting is diabolical too, like the Korean character voiced by a white guy doing a cockney accent.

I was on board for the first couple of hours, but something quickly shifted and I had to stop playing. Perhaps it was the very clearly rigged blackjack minigame that I lost all my money on twice. I’ve read the developer saying it works the same as any casino blackjack, but basically any time I got 20 the house got 20 or 21.

This isn’t a blackjack game though, so I should also mention the looping soundtrack of not very good songs, the unintuitive traversal and aiming (I can imagine the latter being better on PC, but on a PS5 controller it’s rough, even with a generous aim assist) and badly written dialogue. I can’t really comment on the story but let’s just say it didn’t grab me.

I might come back to this another time, but for now it’s backloggd™️