SANTA MONICA—If you'd asked me ahead of E3 2019 which publisher I expected to surprise me the most this year, I wouldn't have answered "THQ Nordic." Austrian publisher Nordic changed its name in 2016 after acquiring a significant slate of defunct THQ assets, and the company has since been soldiering forward with remasters and re-releases of familiar franchises.

While this year's showing isn't up to the likes of more established publishers, their E3 2019 slate isn't so bad—especially thanks to one what-the-heck game from an entirely new IP.

This year sees the company land with a few more remasters, particularly from the Destroy All Humans! and Spongebob Squarepants game series. But the company's really impressive E3 2019 material comes in the form of three brand-new games playable on the show floor. Two of these are sequels: Darksiders Genesis, a two-player, top-down twist on the adventure series, and Desperados III, a return to a nearly forgotten cowboy-stealth series from the mid-'00s.

But the one that really blew my mind is Through the Darkest of Times, from German indie studio Paintbucket Games. This is for two reasons. First, THQN, a company perhaps best known for allying with the hateful imageboard site 8chan in February, is about to launch a video game about mid-1930s anti-Nazi sentiment within Berlin. (Not what you'd expect from a company that recently endorsed 8chan's anti-"SocJus" commentary.) And second, the game in question, while understated and simple in nature, is quite good.

“Commit to resist”



























That's not the same as "fun," of course, and I didn't have what I'd call a rollicking time managing the "antifa" efforts of average German citizens. But that is itself a crucial distinction. TtDoT's first playable build cannot in any way be misconstrued as a silly or tasteless interpretation of the earliest days of the Nazi regime. Neither myself nor my peers at the event noticed any hidden message in the game that somehow glorified Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

The game begins with a series of stark newspaper headlines announcing Hitler's appointment as chancellor by President Hindenburg, along with a character-creation interface that allowed me to pick from a variety of German citizens predisposed to disagreeing with his appointment. The game's denizens all resemble sad versions of Peanuts cartoon characters, and each comes with an introductory statement. One "salesperson" character declares, "Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war. When he says good, he means evil." Another, a "social democrat lawyer," sticks to a similar script: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The resistance will not leave you in peace."

After picking a character with a particular set of in-game statistics, the game's plot thrust begins via text narration: "Three friends meet in a Berlin pub and commit to resist what is about to come. [They must] risk their lives to help others and fight an inhumane regime. This is their story." A conversation plays out via on-screen text, in which I respond to two allies by either agreeing with their violent calls to action or asking them to calm down. No matter what I pick, this is mostly flavor text moving the next inevitable point forward: we are not a militarized force by any stretch. Thus, we must counter Hitler's nationalist rants and policies in subtler fashion.

A larger map opens up at this point, revealing the game's turn-based resource-management system. Your job as the leader of an underground movement is to send yourself and like-minded associates (up to five) to various locations in Berlin. Every location you might go to is marked with costs and benefits, along with an explanation of which team members make the most sense to attend to each.

The catch is, as an underground resistance force, you're always stretched thin. Money's tight. Morale's low. Volunteer numbers are down. And necessary supplies to create anti-Nazi literature or larger anti-Nazi art installations aren't just expensive; buying those kinds of printing and painting supplies might catch a suspicious Nazi official's attention. After all, who needs to buy copious art supplies outside of official, government-sponsored propaganda firms?

Yes, you will lose, and that’s the point

The trick to TtDoT's compelling gameplay is a rarity in the turn-based, resource-management genre: a clear set of stakes in which players are very much expected not to prevail. Instead of constantly aiming to achieve a series of increasingly major successes, you're doing your best to tread water in a timeline that you know isn't going to turn out very well. Your comrades are going to die. Your money or "morale points" are going to occasionally deplete. Every session of this game is a matter of creatively making the most of bad odds and poor dice rolls.

That quality means that eking out tiny victories has a surprisingly satisfying quality to it. By staging the entire game as a political battle, not a military one, the sense of slowly chipping away at a gargantuan objective feels more tolerable, I found. This was helped immensely by the game's efforts to have you empathize with the victims of Nazi brutality within Germany.

TtDoT sells this fact with harrowing, semi-interactive text sequences between rounds, in which you might witness an elderly German Jew being harassed or see historical events unfold, like an official government building burning down and citizens quietly accusing the Nazis of setting that fire as part of a propaganda campaign. Each round also begins with headlines that may sound eerily familiar to modern-day players: Hitler extends a surprisingly kind statement to a group that he seems to otherwise marginalize, demands "emergency decrees" to limit what messages can be broadcast by the press, or starts a trade war against Czechoslovakia.

At the game's reveal event, Paintbucket confirmed that however your first play-through of the game works out, you will "lose." The German government will round up Jews and send them to concentration camps, the country will go to war and spread its violent vision of anti-Semitism across Europe, and the Allied forces will eventually respond. You can do well enough to get the outside world to notice and set WWII's events somewhat into motion, at least. Should you restart the game at that point and try again, however, that will unlock the possibility to rewrite world history... but we didn't see exactly how that would play out, or whether it will work in tasteful fashion.

Still, there's already something remarkable about this game's truly unique combination: a compelling script, all-too-familiar news headlines, and a surprisingly approachable "surviving against tough odds" system. I didn't want to stop playing this game. I liked taking my time, picking through comrades' odds of success, and setting my protest movement into motion while knowing that much of its efforts were inevitably going to fail. And considering the simple, bold cartoon imagery and basic text-and-icons design, I am hopeful that the game (which doesn't have a release date or announced platforms) finds its way to Nintendo Switch before long.

Genesis does what Darksiders didn’t

While I was certainly most struck by TtDoT's juggle of mechanics and concept, I'd be remiss to not break down the quality of THQN's other pre-E3 game reveals.



















Darksiders Genesis is arguably the most promising game in the company's E3 2019 lineup, due to the fact that it offers something I would argue the Darksiders series has needed for years: a serious jolt to the series' formula. The series always felt like an "edgy and mature" transformation of what people loved about the original Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but that tack ran out of air with the underwhelming Darksiders 3 (which, to be fair, has become beefier thanks to post-launch patches and updates).

But the series' otherworldly, Zelda-like combat feels born anew in this new spinoff's top-down perspective. The game lets players either battle monsters cooperatively as a two-player duo or freely swap between its two heroes in single-player mode. Familiar series character War and new "horseman" Strife are the only ones announced as of press time, but at least they offer some variance in both up-close melee blasts (more of War's territory) and long-distance control maneuvers (more of Strife's).

The result is a renewed focus on screen-filling abilities and high-speed dodge maneuvers, arguably turned up to 11 in ways that even Diablo can't touch. This quality was best shown off by an epic, five-minute boss battle against "Lord of Hell: Mammon" that I watched a Darksiders Genesis dev complete when I couldn't come close to winning the thing in my first few attempts. The game's top-down perspective affords much more room for individual attacks to fill massive portions of the screen, both for the heroes and the foes, and the result is arguably more epic to watch than anything ever shown from the tight, third-person perspective of traditional Darksiders games.

Going back and watching my captured footage of this boss battle (which I cannot publicly share, since I, er, recorded it without permission) has me giddy about the combat possibilities this new spinoff game will soon afford the series. This boss' mix of massive, flame-throwing powers and minion-spawning annoyances resulted in one of the best action encounters I've watched in some time.

Two more for the road: stealth cowboys, angry aliens

And rounding out the event's reveals were Desperados III, a brand-new sequel, and Destroy All Humans!, a top-to-bottom remaster of the PS2 original. The former game revives an admittedly dated Desperados series, one that hasn't seen the light of day since 2006, but it takes the point-and-click controls of the original and neatly translates them to a gamepad while maintaining the tension and strategy of the original "sneak around as a cowboy bandit" series.

The 30-minute demo I played saw me switching between various characters in ways that felt organic and interesting, and I had a blast occasionally plotting out individual, simultaneous actions for each before hitting "play" and having their attacks and movements explode all at once. One bandit might set up a distraction or a trap at one end of the top-down, isometric scene near an abandoned railroad track, and that set up the other bandit's quick-draw sniping attack. Y'know, cowboy stuff. The whole thing felt like a thinking person's Diablo, in terms of thinking one step ahead of vigilant nearby enemies and juggling multiple characters' special limited abilities.

I have less to say about the Destroy All Humans! remaster, owing to its admittedly early development state. I was only able to test its opening mission, but I can confirm it played identically to the PS2 original while being smothered in a ridiculous amount of updated polish. Every single in-game model, from huge wooden shacks to flying spaceships, and from slack-jawed yokels to individual blades of grass, has been handsomely redrawn by this remaster's development team.

Whether that's enough to make the remaster's wholly authentic 2005 gameplay feel fresh enough for modern players is another story. But THQN certainly doesn't appear to be taking the easy way out in rebuilding this game for a whole new alien-abduction audience, at least.

Listing image by THQN