The Light in the Darkness: Director’s Cut launches today on PlayStation 5, a free game that follows the story of the Holocaust, bringing the public a WWII game that takes the emphasis off combat and places it on remembrance.
The newly rebuilt version of Luc Bernard’s 2023 narrative game brings full voice acting, expanded story material, as well as an ending at Auschwitz that Bernard says he couldn’t afford to finish in the original self-funded project. The brand new Director’s Cut is backed by the Claims Conference and Meta, he told GamesBeat, and it argues that games can depict atrocity without spectacle.
The game follows the story of a Polish-Jewish family in Nazi-occupied France as antisemitism, state policy and deportation take apart their lives, according to a press release release from Voices of the Forgotten, the nonprofit behind the project. Players stay with the family as their lives become more complicated by the increasingly hostile conditions.
Unlike most World War II games, The Light in the Darkness offers no weapons, no enemies to defeat, and no path to victory and glory.
“The people in this story had no control over the forces closing in on them, and I wanted the player to experience that loss of control,” Bernard explained. The player “can’t save everyone or rewrite history,” he said, but can spend time with the characters and come away with greater empathy for those lost in the Holocaust.
The story ends at Auschwitz, though Bernard said players don’t fully explore it. Players go from the train directly to the gas chambers, to mimic the immediacy of the killings of many of the French Jews who arrived there.
Bernard said a reconstruction lets players feel “the physical reality of the place” in a way photographs and documentaries can’t, so that the location doesn’t just feel like a “vague backdrop.” But he said the team was very intentional in their decisions about what to show.
“The goal was never to recreate suffering for shock value,” he said. The team built the sequence from research, photographs, archival material and documentation, he said, and left out anything exploitative.
For the original game, Bernard said, he did all of the historical research himself, without outside historians or organizations. He did not say whether anyone outside the team reviewed the Director’s Cut.
“I self-funded the original game, so I was working with a very small budget,” Bernard said. He said he couldn’t fully realize the depth of the environments, animation, voice acting or the Auschwitz ending. The Director’s Cut adds rebuilt environments, full voice performances, an expanded narrative, and new animation and story material. The larger budget let him “finish the game how I originally imagined it,” he said.
The Claims Conference, which Bernard described as the organization that administers German government funds for Holocaust survivors, funded the new edition alongside Meta. He said the strength of the original’s research gave the Claims Conference confidence to back the project.
Bernard explained that he made the game free because he doesn’t want cost “to be a barrier to experiencing this story.” He said he believes video games “can make people feel more than any other form of entertainment,” making them a key tool for empathy and for carrying Holocaust memory forward. “It’s more important than ever to remember history as it happened,” he said.
Bernard stepped away from game development two years ago for humanitarian work connected to the war in Gaza. He said he worked with Yehuda Cohen, whose son was held hostage, and that the original game’s reception among governments and anti-terrorism officials helped him evacuate friends’ families from Gaza. He also said Emmanuel Macron’s team asked him to bring Cohen to the United Nations. The experience showed him “the best and worst of people,” Bernard said, and reinforced that “extremism can happen fast.”
The game is not for children, Bernard said. “The game is not, and was never intended to be, for children,” he said. It is rated E10+, he said, but he urged parents to judge for themselves and play it first.
The game is available now on PlayStation 5. Bernard said an Epic Games Store release is “coming soon,” and that more platforms are planned over time.