Wolfenstein isn’t entirely naive, however.

It’s an example of games as naive art, rooted in the things that defined the medium’s adolescence: guns, bigger guns, big fucking guns, demons and Nazis (these things are more or less gaming’s equivalent to a picture of some ferns or a nice lion.) When I reviewed The New Order I wrote that it was beautifully designed, but not the game you’d bring up if you wanted to have a discussion about the nature of games as art. It was just the shit they thought was cool, and there’s power in that mindset.” “It’s also the freest expression of Wolfenstein because it was just these kids making a game in a basement who weren’t hampered by any kind of pretension about true art. “We looked to Wolfenstein 3D because it’s the source,” he says. This meant excising outright the 2009 interpretation of BJ Blazkowicz, who Matthies describes as “a Nathan Drake-type of character.”

Wolfenstein: The New Order expresses the urge to bring these things together in a conscious and critical way – to celebrate, rather than moderate, each of their excesses. Matthies is an action cinema buff and points to the first generation of id Software shooters – including Wolfenstein 3D – as the reason he’s in the games industry. After this the game concerns an insurgency operating out of alt-’60s Berlin, becoming a game where a big man in a brown jacket sprays down Nazis with an upgradable lasergun in brutalist concrete megastructures and also on the moon. After this there’s a run-in with an old villain, an explosion, and a 14-year coma. It’s a return to Castle Wolfenstein in all but name, a swansong for the series’ familiar milieu: a big man in a tan jacket gunning down fascists with a Thompson in hallways full of suits of armour and fading portraits of Nazi field marshals. It’s both a sendoff to the old Wolfenstein and the introduction of the new, stranding the player on a beachhead and forcing them to fight past Nazi robodogs, electrocharged kommando squads, and a building-sized walking Tesla coil called ‘The Stomper’.īeyond the beach is the compound itself, a gothic edifice that riffs on the mossy Teutonic fortresses beloved of the previous games. The first level of Wolfenstein: The New Order is the only part of the game that takes place during the Second World War.

Wolfenstein the new order soldiers