On August 8, Germany’s video game classification board, the USK, announced that they would be lifting their blanket ban on Nazi imagery in video games. This follows a decision by the Attorney General in May to not pursue prosecution in a case concerning a browser game that depicted Swastikas along with a further statement that video games should be given the same legal protections as other types of art. By coincidence, the team behind the historical adventure game, Attentat 1942, was just about to finish their German translation of their game. Initially released in late 2017, they submitted Attentat — chock full of Nazi imagery from the archival photos and film that they use — not fully understanding the complexities of Germany’s censorship laws themselves. A month later, it became the first PC game with Nazi imagery to be released in Germany post-ban.

Attentat 1942’s developers at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences weren’t purposefully trying to snag the first spot in line after the news was announced, but after playing the game, I think there’s something gorgeously fitting about the fact that this small, thoughtful title will lead to a new era in the country.

Developed initially as only one of three games about contemporary Czechoslovak history, Attentat’s story places you in the Czech Republic in 2001. As your grandfather lays ill in a hospital bed, you embark on a mission to learn more about his life under Nazi occupation, his arrest by Gestapo agents, and time spent in a concentration camp. Starting with your grandmother, the majority of the gameplay takes place within interviews with live action actors playing the roles of different relations of your grandfather from wartime. Requiring a glimmer of the strategy you might need in a game like L.A. Noire, you’re often forced to show a bit of restraint or subtlety during the interviews.

One interview puts you in a room with a former neighbor of your grandfather named Josef Málek who wrote for a newspaper during the war. From your grandmother, you know that he wrote articles sympathetic to the Third Reich and may have been the one who sold out your grandfather to the Nazis. After some hesitation at his door, he invites you into his apartment. Speaking to you in his living room, his tone switches between impassioned explanation and awkward apologia, telling you about the systemic way that propaganda articles were written at the time and the way that his writing was protecting the Czech people from further harm.

Throughout the conversation, you have the option to ask Málek, “did you collaborate with the Gestapo?” The question casts a shadow over the conversation and if you pick it, he will clam up and grow hostile. Your role is that of an after-the-fact historian — using interpersonal skills to extract the answers that may provide a coherent truth — just as much as it is a member of a family, urgently trying to connect the dots and learn the stories of your elders before they’re gone.