Attentat 1942

Attentat 1942 is an educational adventure from Charles Games, a studio founded at Charles University, which takes the player into a family history set during the Nazi occupation and the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. As the grandson, the player investigates his grandfather's fate during the Second World War, and through interviews with witnesses, documents and period records gradually uncovers what actually happened to him at the time, and why he preferred never to talk about certain parts of his life; individual chapters take place in different periods of the occupation and complement one another so that the resulting picture of the family history makes sense as a whole. The player moves between the present, where they conduct interviews with living witnesses, and the past, which they experience through flashback sequences.

The game combines drawn graphics and animated sequences with real documentary footage and testimonies from actual witnesses, blurring the line between game and historical document. Mechanically it's an adventure with dialogue trees and puzzles built on connecting information, where the player pieces together the mosaic of the past from fragments of memories that the characters often remember differently or incompletely, and must judge for themselves which version of the story to believe. The game's tone is serious and sensitive, without unnecessary dramatization, emphasizing how historical trauma affects the generations of descendants and how difficult it is to retroactively reconstruct the truth about one's own family.

Attentat 1942 was praised precisely for connecting the game format with genuine historical education, and became a resource used even in schools, where it served as a supplement to teaching about the occupation period. For Charles Games it was their first major project to show that a game can serve as a fully-fledged tool of historical memory, and it opened the way to their further historical titles focused on sensitive periods of Czechoslovak history, a direction the studio continued to pursue in later years.

Why play it: For anyone interested in history, and as a supplement to teaching, Attentat 1942 offers a game as a fully-fledged tool of historical memory, which is why it's genuinely used in schools.