Collaborate or fight? How Gerda: A Flame in Winter forces tough choices

Want to learn more about the future of the video game industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry in October at GamesBeat Summit Next. Sign up today.

Narrative games like Don't Nod's Life is Strange series force players to make tough decisions that could lead to big results or death. And now it's taking that formula and releasing more games made by other developers.

The most recent of these titles is PortaPlay's Gerda: A Flame in Winter, which released September 1 for PC on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It's about a woman in a small village in a historically disputed region between Denmark and Germany, and how she struggles to save her husband from the Nazis during World War II.

At the Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany, I talked about the game with PortaPlay developers Hans Von Knut Skovfoged and Shalev Moran. Skovfoged based the game's story on his grandmother, a half-German, half-Danish woman who was a resistance fighter during World War II. The game dives into the conflict between fighting against the Nazi regime and fighting against individual Germans, who could be part of the family. Sadly, this kind of dilemma is still relevant today, and the game walks players through it.

"We feel the value of seeing human beings, not just seeing stereotypical enemies," Skovfoged said.

Event

Next GamesBeat Summit 2022

Join gaming leaders live October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.

register here

The art of the game is inspired by a period of modern Danish painting, Danish impressionism or the Skagen painters.

Don't Nod, by the way, recently renamed itself Don't Nod.

Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

Shalev Moran (left) and Hans Von Knut Skovfoged at Gamescom 2022.

GamesBeat: Hence where did the idea come from?

Hans Von Knut Skovfoged: We used to do kind of an anti-war war game. Then we thought, well, shouldn't we come up with a game where you try to solve problems in ways other than guns and bombs? I remembered the story of my grandmother, who was a resistance fighter during World War II. However, she did not participate in any violent actions. She and her husband spied on the Germans, took pictures of defensive installations, hid resistance fighters, smuggled weapons in a pram, things like that. She was not just fighting individual Germans. She was fighting the Nazi regime that occupied Denmark. She didn't just want to kill Germans, many of whom were there just because they had to be in the army. She wanted to stand up against the broader occupation.

This nuance, this dilemma: you want to fight for what is right, but you see the enemy in the form of human beings. It was interesting for us. And so we made this game about a half-German, half-Danish woman, a nurse. She does not want to kill her compatriots, whether German or Danish. She wants to help people. But she still to liberate her country from the Nazi regime. She is caught in the middle. Plus, she's a civilian. Civilians cannot simply run out of guns to solve their problems. That's not how the world works. So what can you do? This was the question we decided to explore.

Shalev Moran: