"there's so much more, my love.
just you wait."

when a game comes along with a concept as silly as this, the best thing it can do is take itself seriously.

this is such a sweet, emotionally intelligent game. in the three times i finished it (one for each room), i was greeted with such thoughtful stories of love, loss, and starting over (with a brief foray into bank robbery, because if someone asks you to do crime, you simply don't say no <3).

incredibly sweet, incredibly funny. i'm so glad i played this

where gerda's story splits your limited time and resources between 4 vastly different parties, liva's hones in on one group specifically - her small band of revolutionaries - and i think it is all the stronger for it.

in gerda's story, you begin wanting to make time for everyone, but it quickly becomes apparent that you don't have enough time for that, and so you begin to prioritize those you want to aid the most (in my case, liva and esther). however, because this lesson is learned so quickly, its ending, wherein you are once again forced to choose between those 4 parties, feels anticlimactic. i already made my choice 2 hours ago! it feels like all those choices i had made didn't matter, because i could spend all my time with reinhardt (barf why would i ever) and still choose to let him get arrested at the end.

liva's story, in comparison, is much more concise. you are the leader of the resistance, and so your central choices are all going to revolve around the resistance. will you help a man who has been wrongfully arrested by the gestapo for protesting unfair work conditions, even if it means abandoning your opportunity to get crucial intel from the enemy? will you eliminate the target you have been given by the freedom council, or will you ignore those orders to kill the man that had killed, tortured and sold out your people?

this conciseness really makes it feel that everything that unfolds is a direct impact of the choices you make. i did help out that gestapo prisoner, and lost a comrade and his wife because of it. i chose to kill that snake toft, and the target i was given got away as a result.

these choices, all of which were extremelyyy difficult for me, made the final scene hit so much harder. talking to my comrades, all of whom seem worse off as a result of my actions. it leaves you with a feeling of helplessness that, despite its efforts, gerda's story just couldn't

it may sound from this review that i didn't enjoy gerda's story, but actually, i loved it. so much so that i immediately made a friend start playing so i could watch her play and hear her thoughts on the choices. it is simply for me that this managed to hit even harder, to exceed all expectations i could put on a project published by don't nod. it certainly helps that it focused on my favorite character (a jazz loving twenty something turned leader of a communist movement?? fuck yes that rocks). but they managed to take that amazing character and put her in a situation where she is wholly in charge of her team's future. and agh, what a scary future it is