Peering Through Time: “The Berlin Apartment” Brings a Century of History to Life

Set within the four walls of a single Berlin flat, The Berlin Apartment offers players an extraordinary chance to live through the city’s turbulent past. Developed by indie studio Blue Backpack Games, this immersive narrative experience invites players to peel back layers of history — quite literally — as they explore an apartment that has witnessed decades of joy, fear, and transformation.

The story begins in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown. Streets lie quiet and shuttered, when Malik, a tradesman, takes his daughter Dilara along as he renovates an ageing Berlin apartment. But as they strip the wallpaper and lift the tiles, echoes of the past emerge. Each artefact discovered unlocks the story of a former occupant, transporting players through scenes of German history stretching from the Nazi era to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond.

Lives within Walls

What makes the game remarkable is its focus on ordinary lives. Rather than casting players as heroes or villains, The Berlin Apartment invites them to embody everyday Berliners caught in the machinery of history. A young girl in 1945 decorates her Christmas tree with scraps salvaged from the rubble; a Jewish cinema owner in the 1930s prepares a desperate escape; an East German writer struggles against censorship, typing and retyping her novel to satisfy the state.

These intimate stories unfold across meticulously reconstructed rooms, where sounds — a ticking clock, muffled shouts, the scratch of a pen — bring the atmosphere to life. The game’s art direction transforms archival research and museum references into detailed depictions of interiors that shift subtly with each passing decade.

History without Judgement

Florian Köhne, Blue Backpack’s managing director, explains that though the characters are fictional, their experiences are grounded in historical truth. The game’s purpose isn’t to lecture or moralise, but to let history speak through its inhabitants. As players uncover letters, photos, and fragments of conversation, they begin to understand not only what Berlin went through, but how its people lived, adapted and endured.

Through the Window

A recurring motif — the view from the apartment window — serves as a powerful marker of time. Over the course of the game, the same street corner transforms: trams glide beneath swastika flags in the 1930s; later, barbed wire and watchtowers mark the ruthless divide between East and West. By the twenty-first century, the Wall is gone, replaced once again by a city in motion.

A Quiet Reflection on Humanity

Taking inspiration from narrative-driven titles such as What Remains of Edith Finch, The Berlin Apartment elevates the so-called “walking simulator” genre into something far more profound: a meditation on memory, empathy, and the fragile freedom of choice. Rather than asking players to conquer or collect, it prompts them to reflect. As history unfolds room by room, one question lingers: in their place, what would I have done?

When The Berlin Apartment launches in November 2025, available in both German and English, it promises to offer not just a game, but a moving glimpse into the soul of a city — and the centuries of human stories contained within a single, unassuming flat