Through the Darkest of Times

Through the Darkest of Times is a turn-based resistance management game set across the full arc of the Third Reich, from Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933 to Germany's unconditional surrender. You run a small cell of ordinary Berliners, assigning them to missions each week: distributing leaflets, gathering intelligence, sabotaging infrastructure, or recruiting new members. The loop sounds simple. The tension it generates is anything but. From a mechanical standpoint, every action costs time, morale, and risk. Followers have individual suspicion meters, and a careless assignment can get someone arrested, tortured, or worse. Resource management is tight by design. You rarely have enough people to do everything you want, so you prioritize constantly. Do you spend this week boosting morale inside the group, or push for a high-value sabotage that might burn a reliable operative? Those decisions stack across years of in-game time, and the weight of each one accumulates in ways that feel genuinely uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. The game does not shy away from the historical reality. Between missions you get illustrated vignettes documenting actual events: the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, deportations. These are not decorative. They affect the morale of your cell and the political climate meter you are constantly fighting against. The art style, stark black-and-white with occasional color, keeps the tone somber without being exploitative. For a game about this subject, that is a difficult balance to strike and Paintbucket Games largely gets it right. On the strategy side, newcomers should find the entry curve manageable. The mission categories are clearly labeled with risk levels, and the early years of the campaign give you room to learn before the Gestapo pressure really tightens. It is not a complex systems game in the Paradox sense. There are no tech trees or resource chains to optimize. The depth here is about judgment, not calculation. That said, experienced strategy players looking for late-game mechanical complexity may find the systems thin once they have internalized the risk-reward logic. Replayability is moderate rather than high, though different follower compositions and moral choices do shift how individual runs feel. The AI opponents are essentially the historical apparatus itself, which is grim but thematically appropriate. There is no modding ecosystem worth mentioning. The game is what it is: a focused, authored experience with a specific story to tell. It runs clean on PC, has no significant technical issues to flag, and finishes in roughly six to ten hours depending on how carefully you read the historical commentary. For players who want strategy games to do something beyond optimizing numbers, Through the Darkest of Times earns its Very Positive rating.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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