The Darkest Files

Publisher: Paintbucket Games · Creator: Jörg Friedrich

Anecdote

A work by the Berlin studio Paintbucket Games, already known for Through the Darkest of Times, The Darkest Files was published in April 2025 and inaugurates a new sub-genre: the post-1945 judicial investigation simulator dedicated to the pursuit of Nazi criminals. The player takes on the role of Esther Katz, a fictional young prosecutor in the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office assigned to the special unit of Attorney General Fritz Bauer in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s. Directors Jörg Friedrich and Sebastian Schulz, who had already distinguished themselves through their historical rigour, this time draw on genuine case files held in the archives of the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt. Each case, freely adapted from a real file, leads the player to investigate massacres committed during the war — a pogrom against Soviet prisoners, atrocities carried out by the 116th Panzer Division in Normandy, the deportation of Dutch Jews — and then to gather witness testimony, cross-reference documents, and present charges before a German court where the defence exploits every procedural loophole. A single investigation lasts between two and four hours, and the complete campaign around twenty hours. The art direction blends Indian-ink sequences inspired by the drawings of Jeanne Mammen with sober three-dimensional courtroom reconstructions. The score by composer Sebastian Knappe draws on post-war German jazz atmospheres and unsettling silences. The game, produced in partnership with the Fritz Bauer Institut and the Fondation Mémoires de la Shoah, is distributed within the German educational programme on the Auschwitz trials. It extends Paintbucket's civic mission and explores a dimension rarely addressed by the medium: the judicial struggle for justice in the aftermath of crime.