The Berlin Apartment by Blue Backpack
The Berlin Apartment takes place in a single apartment in Berlin, in several episodes across different years. That is, the geometry of the setting is essentially the same across most episodes, but of course, each occupant of the apartment has decorated it differently, and their concerns are different.
The game’s frame is that in 2020, Malik and his daughter Dilara are renovating the apartment, and over the course of their work, discover things left behind by the previous occupants, and tell each other stories of what must have happened here in the past. Malik and Dilara are apparently German citizens of Turkish extraction; Germany has a substantial Turkish minority population, most of whom immigrated during post-WWII labor shortages, a phenomenon unthinkable in earlier eras.
Dilara, over the course of the game, puts together a book with keepsakes from the apartment’s earlier inhabitants, and at game’s end, they leave this as a kind of time capsule in the apartment, presumably for future inhabitants to find.
The game is a sort of 3D adventure game, but not a conventional point-and-click one; each episode requires you to explore the apartment’s space, but each has its own challenges, which are diverse.
Before the Wall Came Down
After the first sequence with the father-and-daughter team, we transition to the apartment as it was in 1989; then, it was on the East Berlin side of the wall, with its windows looking out on the wall and on apartments on the West Berlin side. Here, you play as Kolja, an underemployed botanist taking care of his plants; his roommate has recently left for the West, and he feels somewhat abandoned. A paper airplane flies in through the window, and he unfolds it to find that a tenant on the West Berlin side has noticed his plants and sent him a message.
Over the course of the episode, you write and fold your own paper airplanes, trying (and often failing) to throw them so that they land in your correspondent’s apartment across the wall. At times, air patterns change, and this becomes challenging (but if you fail multiple times, eventually the game allows you to skip the throw and progress the story).
Meanwhile, you have conversations with your fish, Erich, who is apparently a staunch Communist and disapproves of this fraternization with capitalism, and apparently embark on a kind of romance with your Wessie neighbor.
Between each episode, we return to Malik and Dilara, discuss what we’ve uncovered about the apartment’s past, place treasures in Dilara’s box, and do some chores for Dad to help with the renovation.
Inventory Management
The next episode is set in 1945; you play as a young girl decorating the mostly ruined apartment with sad, homemade decorations for Christmas. Berlin has fallen, and you see, both through the windows and by briefly exiting the apartment, the appalling destruction Berlin has suffered in the war. You interact with your little brother and sad-faced mother, who is employed by the Russian occupiers to help clear rubble, and who has somehow scored a bag of turnips, from which she is trying to prepare some kind of Christmas dinner. Your father is not around, and it’s unclear whether he was a war casualty or is now a Russian POW.
In the next episode, you play as an elderly Jewish movie producer and cinema owner, in 1933, packing up to flee with your daughter to France after the Nazis burned out your cinema because, you know, Jewish. The gameplay here involves finding the elements you want to pack in your bag and doing the Tetris-inventory close-packing thing in your bag.
In some ways, this is the most annoying sequence in the game, because hobbling about on your cane, you move through the apartment quite slowly, and finding everything is a chore. Pro-tip: when you find the drawer with keys in it and remark about how you’ve kept all the keys because you’re not sure what they do anymore, your diary (which you need to pack) is there. Don’t shut the drawer; pick up the keys in turn until you find the one you need to unlock your diary, allowing you to progress.
The Stories We Tell
The final sequence is triggered when Dilara, helping her Dad dump old stuff from the apartment down a chute, discovers an old typewriter, and relates the story of how its owner was a famous writer and also a cosmonaut. This is actually the trippiest segment in the game, because while the author, Antonia, is sometimes shown in the apartment, she spends most of the sequence in the spaceship of the science fiction novel she is writing.
Her main problem is that in East Germany in 1967, what she is writing is subject to revisions from the state censors, and what they want her to change is maddening and subversive of the story she wants to tell, but she has to comply in some fashion to achieve publication.
The Verdict:
The Berlin Apartment is interesting both in how it repurposes a single environment to tell multiple stories and also in its unflinching portrayal of Germany’s difficult and often unhappy history, not to mention the way it varies gameplay with each historical episode and portrays very different protagonists in each.
It is redolent in history, well voice-acted, has a bit of an emotional punch, and is well worth your attention if interested in narrative games.
The Berlin Apartment is available via the Sony PlayStation Store, Microsoft Xbox Live, and Steam.
Watch the trailer for The Berlin Apartment below:
