The Berlin Apartment review – room with multiple views

A first person narrative game set across 100 years of German history is one of the least action-packed games of the year but features some of the best storytelling.

In 1989 Richard McGuire published a comic strip called Here, which caused a bit of a sensation. It depicted a single room in America, in time periods that varied from billions of years BC to 2033 AD, dwelling on the life of one character who lived there between the 1950s and the end of the 2020s. It was later turned into a far more fleshed out graphic novel and a lifelessly dull Robert Zemeckis film, but its theme remains an inspiration.

The Berlin Apartment uses a similar premise. Its stories occur in the rooms of a flat over the course of a century, so a considerably more modest span than Here, but one that takes in some infamous parts of twentieth century history, namely the two world wars. Because of its location, The Second World War is clearly the more central, but the game’s first person experience starts in the 2020s. A man’s been hired to renovate the apartment and has brought along his young daughter.

As he knocks down walls and begins the redecorating process, she helps peel off wallpaper and smash bathroom tiles to make way for new ones, while filtering through the ancient detritus they uncover and wondering about the stories of the people who used to live there. As the player you start by seeing through her eyes, but swiftly switch to the flat’s earlier inhabitants, beginning in 1989 – the year the Berlin Wall fell.

In the earlier part of that year the apartment’s front windows still overlooked the Wall from the East German side. Its resident is a man named Kolja, who’s surprised to find a paper aeroplane sailing through his window. Unfolding it he finds a letter from a woman on the West German side. Deciding to reply, he writes a few lines, and you help him fold and launch the paper dart using Quantic Dream style pushes and pulls of an analogue stick.

In the course of their correspondence you get to wander the flat and its kitchen, discovering posters for Bob Dylan and The Why, along with Kolja’s love of German punk and the fact that he doesn’t have much to eat beyond mouldy cheese and solyanka soup, a Russian speciality clearly inflicted on much of the Eastern bloc it dominated in those days. It’s clear he’s enjoying illicitly getting to know someone from the West.

As their secret conversation continues the weather gets worse, forcing Kolja to fold more robust planes, steering them against the wind and using thermals to find their way to the right balcony on the other side of the wall. Eventually they exchange phone numbers, and after waiting several days for the sternly bureaucratic DDR switchboard to connect him to a line outside East Germany, they have dinner together over the phone.

Back in 2020, the father and daughter team continue their redecoration, finding an old postcard of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate decked out in full Nazi regalia. ‘Not a good time,’ as the dad understatedly puts it. The game then takes you back to 1933 and the life of Josef, an elderly Jewish man preparing to flee Germany for France. He’s packing a case, trying to fit in a few mementos from his life in Berlin to take with him.

He walks with a stick, and while none of The Berlin Apartment’s stories is told in a hurry, the meditative pace of Josef’s adds to its poignancy. As a young man, he was passionate about photography and later bought a derelict old theatre, turning it into a thoroughly modern cinema. It’s a tale of joy tinged with tragedy, as his dreams roared to life and were eventually extinguished. He doesn’t need to bring any of his old contracts or tax returns, but he won’t be leaving his precious camera behind.

It’s beautifully observed, from the neighbour banging on the ceiling of her flat, complaining about the noise of Josef hobbling about, to the way he gently picks up a framed photograph that’s fallen over. He has a fondness for Russian adventure novels, even though he doesn’t have room to pack any of them. The minimal graphics and first person view make the whole process highly personal and evocative. And then we’re back in 2020.

The two further flashbacks – to a family doing their best to celebrate Christmas in 1945, in the tank-strewn bombed out rubble of post-War Berlin, and then to a novelist in the ‘60s trying to deal with an overbearing government imposing strict controls on what she’s allowed to write – its stories are neither neat nor twisty. Instead, they conjure up the sense of each time period from deeply personal perspectives. It’s a quality that separates games from films or literature, letting you briefly inhabit each of these people’s lives in different eras of the apartment’s history.

In fairness, The Berlin Apartment isn’t really a game but what’s cruelly referred to as a walking simulator. Packing Josef’s suitcase takes a little Tetris-style work, and there’s a charmingly incorporated game of Minesweeper hidden behind those pleasing-to-smash bathroom tiles, but your journey through recent history is more about characters and events than skill or dexterity.

You need to be in the right mood to let it all sink in, its unhurried pace and reflective atmosphere the very opposite of first person action games. It may be overpriced, but there’s still much to like and plenty to think about, its storytelling and warm characterisation providing a delightful afternoon’s tour of recent German history.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: btf
Developer: Blue Backpack, ByteRockers’ Games, and Parco Games
Release Date: 17th November 2025
Age Rating: 16

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