The Berlin Apartment Review

The Berlin Apartment is a narrative adventure that puts you in the primary role of a child helping his father renovate an apartment in Berlin. The apartment is quite old and has seen a lot of history, not just outside its windows, but through the people that have lived there over the years. As you help your father with various tasks, you uncover small mementos left behind by prior residents. Each of these leads to a story within the story, in which you become the resident who owned the memento and live through the episode in their life at which the memento gained its significance. There are four of these stories in all, which take place during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the height of the Cold War, and shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The main story and each of the episodes take place entirely within the apartment, so you will get to know its layout pretty well. If you’ve played adventure games before, the gameplay will feel familiar to you. You’ll be given a task and will need to perform various actions or collect certain objects to complete them. The gameplay tends more towards an item hunt than a series of puzzles, and the few puzzles that do appear in the game are all relatively simple to solve. There are also numerous interactive objects to discover in each episode that are there for color and to help you learn more about the current protagonist and the time in which they live.

Each episode is interesting and compelling, but you should be aware that they are each a slice of life episode rather than a complete narrative. You’ll learn about each person’s background a bit here and there during the stories, but there are no backstories or introductions to the stories. And at the end of each, you’re not given a conclusion or complete resolution – it’s left to your imagination to determine what happened to each person once you leave their lives. Personally, I appreciated this narrative style while playing the game; each story stuck with me and I found myself speculating what happened to each person afterwards. If you’re the kind of person that needs your stories tied-up with a nice bow, though, you’ve been warned.

The Berlin Apartment isn’t a very long game – you can finish it within three or four hours. It doesn’t feel short, though, the time it spends with each story feels right and you will be left with the impression that you’ve watched an interesting movie or read a good short story with that time. It also has the benefit of making the game relatively easy to Platinum since you can see what remains after your first playthrough and then power through the game again to sweep-up any trophies that you’ve missed.

I enjoyed the time I spent visiting The Berlin Apartment. I felt engaged with the people, and seeing some of the tumultuous times in 20^th Century German history through the eyes of people living through those times. This is a game with a story to tell, and it’s an interesting one.