Dark Auction Review – Visual Beauty, Ethical Missteps

Dark Auction Review

IzanagiGames’s new mystery adventure visual novel Dark Auction is deeply troubling. Originally titled Dark Auction: Hitler’s Estate, IzanagiGames removed all named references to Hitler from the game and its promotional materials after controversy marred its initial announcement. Its Steam page comes with the addendum that Dark Auction “does not in any way, seek to glorify or promote the crimes of war.” This note doesn’t mention which war, why these crimes happened, or who they happened to.

Removing his name changes nothing. The game is still clearly centered around fascist dictator Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, this examination of Hitler and the time period does not succeed.

A Reprehensible Backdrop

The year is 1981. Noah Crawford is an affable young man who tracks his father to an auction selling the effects of Adolf Hitler — sorry, “Dictator X” — in a mysterious European manor. He makes it just in time to watch his father draw his last breath before the “Auctioneer,” a scheming man wearing a parrot mask informs him that he’s just joined the “Auction.”

Noah becomes one of a half-dozen who exchange memories for long-lost family heirlooms. These items were all were acquired by their Nazi collaborator family members by Hitler himself. If they lie during the Auction, they will be killed. Each day, Noah investigates the participants to help them survive and to uncover the truth about his father.

This premise — even the heavy-handed Japanese symbolism of the parrot as intermediary to the divine — could work. Handled sensitively, six young people grappling with their complicated relationships between their loved ones’ connection to Nazi Germany and to their families could be deeply compelling.

That’s not what happens. The characters grapple with all sorts of things: personal freedom, wealth inequality, familial expectations. They don’t grapple with the impact their direct family members had as part of the most infamously genocidal regime in history. The word Nazi is never mentioned. Neither, you can imagine, is the word Jew. Instead, characters bask in a morbid fascination with a perceived opulence of Hitler’s regime.

Nazis Without Context

Dark Auction expects players to understand as a young woman exclaims her sympathy for her grandfather, once Dictator X’s personal aide. How difficult it must have been for him to manage his schedule, she cries! By doing so, the game mistakes humanizing for sympathizing.

The game’s premise exploits the perverse thrill of the taboo without even a cursory exploration of what made Nazi Germany’s crimes so evil. It plumbs Hitler’s fascination with mysticism to tell its own fantastical story. Despite its disclaimer, its obsession with Adolf Hitler valorizes him as an individual, its narrative assuming we, too, are as seduced by Hitler’s personal magnetism as the characters in the game.

The terrible backdrop makes me less inclined to forgive the endless logical inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies, and unbelievable story developments. The game’s strongest moments — its growing personal relationships between the cast — could have developed in any tense, closed-door mystery setting. It’s worse for having Nazis.

Watching It All Play Out

Strip away the story, and there isn’t much left to the gameplay. Players click the next line of dialogue from a list of options — even if sometimes there’s only one choice — and are occasionally called on to remember some previously stated fact. Aside from the auctions, the rest of the game is a movie. This game takes about twelve hours to complete; it should take seven. The interface moves slowly even when speeding through the dialogue. Similarly sluggish cutscenes bog down the pacing. Movement consists of walking back and forth across the manor’s main hall to access the library, elevator, and lounge.

This is made even more repetitive by the stories between auctions, which endlessly send poor Noah chasing characters to the same handful of locations. Nothing says fun like taking the elevator up to visit a specific character, have them turn you away, and then finally return to the exact same location for the awaited conversation three scenes later.

Combined with the repetitive dialogue and plot structure, the actual playing experience is tedious. Every auction requires sitting through the same instructions and exclamations of confusion from the characters. Every auction ends by unveiling the final version of the memories you have just spent 30 minutes putting together yourself.

Puzzling, Not Deducing

Although it’s occasionally a decent puzzle game, this is not a deduction game. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Phoenix Wright isn’t a true deduction game, and it’s got plenty going for it — such as not being obsessed with Nazi Germany.

Puzzles take place during the auctions, when players fix characters’ memories using facts they’ve learned throughout each day. Solving these takes some creative thinking, but the game spoon-feeds solutions with constantly repeated dialogue, reminders, and even flashbacks to minutes or even seconds before.

The game is beautiful, both in the character designs and the 3-D rendered settings.

An Unsatisfying Conclusion

It’s good that the conclusion vaguely condemns the evil — and dramatically silly — plot it has uncovered, but that impact pales next to an entire game spent ogling over Hitler’s personal possessions and companions. I sense naivety, not malice, behind this game’s intentions: an attempt to make beauty and peace out of painful past. Unfortunately, IzanagiGames’s choice of setting and content demand a greater reckoning than Dark Auction provides.

As the last real-life Holocaust survivors pass away, treating Hitler and his regime as gothic intrigue risks simplifying a complex and tragic history. Dark Auction asks players to solve riddles and chase clues tied to Hitler’s legacy, but that legacy is already documented in history. The game doesn’t need to dramatize it; the facts speak for themselves.

***A Steam key was provided by the publisher***