Some places are synonymous with certain years. If I say 1933, 1945 or 1989, where else but Berlin?
The Berlin Apartment is a game about different kinds of people whose lives are buffeted by the political forces of their times.
Visually, its fine lines and flat colors were inspired by the French cartoonist Moebius, whose work has served as a touchstone for games such as Sable. Structurally, it owes a debt to What Remains of Edith Finch, which recounted the generational story of a family in the Pacific Northwest. Both games unfold as a series of short stories that are grounded in a domestic space that morphs in unexpected ways.
It is 2020 when a handyman and his daughter pull up in a van at the opening of The Berlin Apartment. Dilara would rather be in school, but on account of the social distancing of that annus horribilis, she must share her father’s workday. Malik is there to renovate an apartment, a place that bears remnants of the past, which his daughter discovers while trying to stave off boredom.
At the behest of her father, Dilara performs simple chores such as tearing down wallpaper and searching for a screwdriver. These tasks lead her to uncover items left by the previous tenants. In the wall of one room she finds a letter, while in a partially collapsed stove she discovers a Christmas ornament. When she shows off these objects to her father, Malik relates a story tied to the item in question. Each tale results in a spatiotemporal shift as players step into the role of different characters.
The first story, “Growing Wings,” is set in 1989 and places the player in the role of a botanist with low self-esteem. Your first concern is to help him get up after he falls on his back watering his plants, finding himself unwittingly listening to political propaganda on the radio.
On his feet, the botanist can carry on a (very droll) conversation with his stern, pro-East Germany goldfish. The voice acting makes it easy to sympathize with the lonely, self-deprecating guy who misses a roommate who immigrated to the West. Serendipity strikes when a paper airplane sails through his window with a message from a West Berliner: His orchids need watering.
So begins a flirtation carried on through ever more elaborately constructed paper airplanes cast over the Berlin Wall. Hans Böhme, the game’s director, told me the inspiration came from “a sweet little viral TikTok where a person during the pandemic saw their neighbor in another building and sent a drone over there to schedule a romantic dinner.”
The next two stories take place in 1933 and 1945. In “The Suitcase,” the player is cast in the role of an old man who was once the proprietor of a local cinema. To his dismay, he finds himself forced to give up his apartment, a considerably larger prewar version of the one seen in the botanist’s story. Pressed for time, he must gather what he can to flee the anti-Jewish laws encroaching around him.
The indignity of his situation is brought home by the contrast between the vast corpus of mementos and film archives that line his apartment and the paltry number of things that players can fit in his suitcase. It’s possible to fail to squeeze in everything he wishes to take — as I did — which illustrates the unbearable compromises of forced exile.
By contrast, “Silent Night” tells the story of the family that poached his apartment and is struggling to make ends meet at the end of the war. It concludes with a young girl asking her mother earnest questions about their family’s complicity in the destruction all around them.
Böhme said that it would have been easier to fill the gameplay with puzzles, but that the team at btf Games wanted people to focus on the narrative. “I think we learned tons about interactive storytelling and trying not to be too on the nose,” he said.
Clocking in at under three hours, The Berlin Apartment doesn’t overstay its welcome. I found the writing in the 1989 and 1933 sequences to be good, but the overall tenor of those stories struck me as sentimental. In contrast, the 1945 episode and especially the game’s climactic 1967 episode — which tells the story of a novelist forced to compromise her creative vision to please East German censors — impressed me as much more biting.
“The way you played it almost reflects the way in which we produced these episodes,” Böhme said. “And I think you can kind of tell a little bit that we get more secure.”
The Berlin Apartment was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.
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