The Nazis picked a bad time to start shooting, since within seconds Blazkowicz awakens, ready to blast away any and all Aryan fools who dare stand against him. It’s a bleak sequence, and things quickly take a turn for the worse as fascists do what fascists do best - they start killing people. Through his own haunting narration, we catch a glimpse of time passing by, watching as the world falls into fascist control as soldiers march into the hospital he calls home, eager to take patients away for twisted experiments and push staff away like they’re nothing. It begins beautifully, detailing our hero’s final stand against the Nazi menace before being plunged into a coma for decades.

Maybe such people should take a step back and make sure they’re on the right side of things.īut I’m not here to talk about that today, I instead want to touch on the beauty of storytelling in Wolfenstein: The New Order and how it tackled such things in a way that shooters never really had before. As it should, such individuals have no place in our society and must be snuffed out, and it’s fun to watch them grow angry about a game which literally involves the attempted assasination of Adolf Hitler. Wolfenstein’s relevance in our own cultural zeitgeist would grow in relevance with the election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of far-right voices from across the globe, with Bethesda leaning into the demonisation of such bigots in the game’s marketing. Related: There Is No Winning With The Returnal Difficulty Debate Now, he was ready to pass this torch onto a growing resistance movement and take his country, and soon, the world back from fascist control. Fighting for his country in World War Two and waking up to a world where the enemy had won and enslaved the human race awakened something in him - a flame of resistance that never truly died. Blazkowicz is still all about murdering fascists and saving America, but he performs such acts with a surprising element of grace. I think part of The New Order’s success was a willingness to subvert expectations, taking the original generic protagonist and transforming him into a sympathetic hero with trauma, history, and motivations that all felt genuine.

Wolfenstein: The New Order proved to be one the most immersive shooter experiences in years, taking the most generic premise in genre history and morphing it into a nuanced, introspective narrative that wasn’t afraid to pull any punches, especially if said punches were being hurled into a Nazi’s face.

Despite this, that’s exactly what the studio did. The franchise had been rebooted with little success before, and a fledgling studio like MachineGames weren’t guaranteed to step up to the plate and deliver a homerun that would leave us speechless. Back when it was first announced, expectations for Wolfenstein: The New Order were rather muted.

Wolfenstein the new order cutscenes