“The Light in the Darkness” by Voices of the Forgotten

The Light in the Darkness is set during the 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris; the mass arrest by Vichy French authorities of foreign Jewish families with prisoners later deported to death camps. Throughout the story the player takes control of different members of a family of working-class Polish Jews as these political events change and shape their lives. The player’s choices and actions have no impact on the tragic outcome of the story, or the order in which the scenes unfold. Rather, the player is invited to fulfill tasks that range from the mundane (as the son the player helps at the family shop or plays with friends) to the disturbing (as the mother the player stitches the Star of David onto items of clothing).

A playthrough of The Light in the Darkness leaves the sense that, while the characters themselves are fictionalized, at the level of events the game represents a kind of historical record; an impression reinforced by the game’s occasional use of photographs and images of historical artifacts, a break from the game’s cartoonish art style. This emphasis on faithfulness to history is mirrored in the game’s development which featured consultation by Holocaust researcher and survivor Joan Salter. It is of note that while games about the Holocaust tend to struggle to reach a large audience due to reluctance from publishers, The Light in the Darkness has secured distribution by major gaming platforms; at the time of writing (April 2023) the pre-release version is available on both the Epic and Xbox storefronts. Indeed, the project’s game director, Luc Bernard, had previously failed to secure publishing for a different educational Holocaust game entitled Imagination is the Only Escape (2008).

The Light in the Darkness is intended as an educational game, primarily for a middle school audience. With this in mind the way that it presents historical reality might be considered in light of the wider digitization Holocaust memory via interactive electronic museums exhibits, online archives, immersive augmented reality experiences, etc. Of particular interest in the context of perpetrator studies is the wide variety of perpetrators and perpetration represented in the game and the focus on the day-to-dayness or mundanity of large scale perpetration: On the one hand authorities from the French police to prison guards or Nazi officials exercise their formal power, but on the other the citizenry of Paris becoming less friendly to the Jewish protagonists, a loyal customer opportunistically takes over their family’s shop, and children at a playground bully and refuse to play with the Jewish boy.

Author of this entry: Alie Tacq

The Light in the Darkness, Arcade Distillery, Voices of the Forgotten, 2023, https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/the-light-in-the-darkness-6ee5e4