Players recruit members, allocate limited resources, choose covert actions, and manage the risk of exposure while a hostile regime escalates around them.
Why it may be useful
Through the Darkest of Times turns resistance into risk management: every leaflet run is a real gamble with a named person's safety, and the game refuses the fantasy that a small cell can change the outcome.
Keep in mind
Your resistance group is fictional, so treat the game as a way into the period rather than a history of real resistance networks.
Written 2026-09-15 · editorial assessment, not a measured effect · how we rate →
What the game is
Through the Darkest of Times is a turn-based strategy game by Paintbucket Games, published by HandyGames and released in January 2020. You lead a small resistance group in Berlin from 1933 onward, across four chapters that run through the Nazi era. You make up your own leader at the start, choosing background and politics, and then recruit a handful of ordinary people around them.
The look is deliberately austere: charcoal-grey illustration, a map of Berlin districts, portraits of your members down one side. Each turn opens with a page of history written in the voice of a newspaper, telling you what has just happened in the country. Then you place your people on the map.
The actions available are the small ones real groups had: painting slogans on a wall, printing and handing out leaflets, collecting money, quietly recruiting a sympathizer, occasionally sabotage. Each carries a chance of being seen. Members who are caught are beaten, arrested or disappear, and they do not come back. The game states plainly that a group like yours cannot change the outcome of the war.
What you actually do
A turn is an allocation problem with people instead of counters. You have four or five members, each with traits that make them better or worse at a given job and more or less likely to draw attention. You choose which actions to run, who runs them, and how far to push. Pushing harder gains supporters and money faster and raises the risk that somebody is picked up.
Between turns the situation deteriorates on its own schedule, regardless of what you did. Laws tighten, friends emigrate, and members bring you personal problems that you answer in short dialogue scenes. Getting better means accepting a smaller ambition: protect the people you have, keep one printing operation running, and stop expecting a win condition that is not there.
What it exercises
Allocates scarce people to tasks that suit their strengths
Weighs the value of an action against the risk to a person
Reads a historical narrative and connects it to a decision just made
Keeps acting toward a goal that cannot be fully reached
Why we rate it Low Worksheet score 52 / 100
FitHow much real knowledge or skill does the play itself make you use?55weight 45%
Fifty-five. Risk is expressed as a mechanic, not narration: every leaflet run is a real gamble with a named person's safety, and that keeps the fit well above pure theme. It settles in the middle because the historical understanding on offer comes largely from the text between turns, which a player can skim, so the reasoning is one narrow decision repeated rather than a wide subject worked through.
TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?52weight 30%
Fifty-two. What generalizes is a way of thinking about risk under a hostile system, what an action costs, who bears that cost, and what remains worth doing when the outcome is fixed, and that reasoning is plausible to carry elsewhere though unproven. It stays in the middle because the specific content is one particular history and trains no everyday skill directly.
PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?45weight 25%
Forty-five. Four chapters keep returning to the same allocate-and-risk decision, and the game is built to be replayed with a different leader whose politics change what the group will do, which is real but modest repetition. It stays low in the range because a single run is finite and the action list stays fairly small throughout, closer to one long playthrough than a system that keeps demanding more.
What the evidence says
Editorial onlyNobody outside our desk has checked this. It is our reading of how the game plays.
The level is Editorial only: our judgment grounded in the mechanics. The Steam listing on file confirms the developer and publisher, the January 2020 release, the four chapters, the PEGI 16 rating with content warnings, and the described actions of leafleting, painting slogans, sabotage and recruitment. It does not measure anything about players. No study of this game is cited because we know of none, and we make no claim that playing it teaches the history. What it does is put a player in the position of spending people, which the reading between turns then gives context for.
Editorial assessment - not a measured scientific effect.
Fit
55/100
Transfer
52/100
Practice
45/100
Why it makes the cut
PASS - Its resistance-cell management structure holds up strategically on its own.
Editorial only
This is our reading of the mechanics; the Steam listing confirms the developer, release and content warnings, but nothing about what a player takes from playing, and no study of this game exists.
Prices are US store listings in USD, last refreshed 2026-09-25; regional prices and sales differ.
No subscription requirement was found on the verified PC route.
Steam currently verifies interface support for the listed locales. Full audio and subtitle support are only marked where a current Steam source states them explicitly.
Every leaflet run is a genuine gamble with a person's safety, which keeps the risk reasoning real, but the action list stays small, so the practice does not build far.
