Post Script

How MachineGames and Arkane imagine the ’80s under the Nazis

Youngblood is unusually shy about showing off its 1980s setting at a time when pop culture is absolutely transfixed by the period – not just the ’80s, either, but a peculiar and imaginary version of the decade which never really took place, but is slowly eroding the more mundane reality as Stranger Things et al repaint the decade in their own image. For all the advantages of being set in an already established alternate history, MachineGames and Arkane’s slant on the ’80s adheres closely to that revisionist, synthwave-drenched version realised in Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Black Mirror’s San Junipero episode and – god rest its soul – Radical Heights.

Kudos must be apportioned to this game for resisting the urge to soak everything in magenta and cyan lighting, the laziest ’80s shorthand in game design. Instead, you’ll often find rooms teeming with analogue computer screens when you’re out exploring, each encased in dull beige plastic, the rooms housing them ensconced in thick black cabling as though electricity back then was somehow more volatile and required that much more shielding.

At the climax of the Brother 1 raid, a Nazi supercomputer which most living rooms would struggle to contain is revealed. It’s a giant triangle of sheer menace and pulsing red lights, nothing of its form giving any indication to its function. That’s how people saw computers, once: great wedges of indistinguishable and unknowable technology.

Most effective of all these soft-touch period elements are the teeth-grinding synth-pop songs overheard on the radio during Youngblood’s opening level. It’s not just the squelchy synthesisers or the subaction movie soundtrack melodies that irritate, it’s the fact these are state-sanctioned songs. In Youngblood’s

horrifying vision of Nazi totalitarianism, this is the only music in existence. The likes of Madonna, Billy Joel and Queen simply never happened. As minor a point as it seems, it’s those tiny infringements on your simplest freedoms that give you pause for thought. In a universe where the Third Reich won the war decades ago, this more mundane oppression would come to characterise the lives of Parisians. It’s also a neat subversion of that feeling to find a Wolfenstein 3D

arcade cabinet within the resistance headquarters in the Paris catacombs. It’s a relic from a bygone era, yes, but it’s also a startling liberty to be playing such a game right under the noses of the subject matter – not to mention incredibly meta.

Those overt touches of ’80s culture sit alongside the same ornate bookcases and pompous busts found in many nooks and crannies or The New Colossus, and the effect feels curiously close to the Dishonored games:

old-world decadence alongside imaginary tech. The effect would be all the more engaging if it weren’t so familiar. In the broader strokes of Paris’ architecture, there’s a lot of Corvo Attano’s old haunt, Karnaca. Dishonored 2’ s fictional city was itself inspired by southern Europe and its tenement blocks appear as though picked up and placed carefully down again here. The big difference here, of course, is that they’re almost all draped in swastikas.

Take a sightseeing tour of Youngblood’s Paris and, in between frequent fights for your life, you’ll find districts sectioned off by enormous dark grey steel walls. Checkpoints ruin the graceful architectural lines, and turrets impose themselves on otherwise friendly Gallic civic buildings. Joyless sans serif text distinguishes one district from another: ‘KLEIN BERLIN’ forces itself on a previously open, civilian neighbourhood. The Nazi occupation of the city almost looks like a physical infection, an alien body latching onto Paris and suffocating it.

Here, Youngblood seems to find a different source of inspiration for its alt-history ’80s: East Berlin. Before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Germany’s own capital was divided in broadly similar fashion to these Paris hub areas, and retrospective insights from the likes of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film The Lives Of Others give a similar atmosphere to the one you feel when standing before one of those impossibly tall walls in Youngblood: an atmosphere of isolation and secrecy; the sense hundreds of people just out of view are watching and listening to your every move, and you could rise up and overthrow them, if only you knew where to aim. That’s what makes the infiltrations into Paris’ three Brother districts such a thrill. Not only are you going somewhere you’re strictly, absolutely verboten to set foot and doing so right under the noses of your oppressors, but you’re opening the enormous door on your way out, too. After each raid is completed, the Brother districts become easier to pop in and out of. There’s a sense of gradually dismantling them.

Last and most on-the-nose of Youngblood’s ’80s elements are its collectibles. These floppy disks, cassette tapes and 3D goggles are strewn across Paris as though left behind by particularly thoughtless and pop culture-loving Soldaten as they go gallivanting through the city. They don’t say much about the game world, but they do say something about the our tendency to fetishise dead tech. It would have been impossible to imagine back in the day, for example, that cheap storage disks or flimsy cardboard glasses which had very little bearing on day-to-day life would one day be used to succinctly capture a whole era.

A peculiar and imaginary version of the decade which never really took place, but is slowly eroding the reality