If you ever wanted to play a sad tamagotchi – this game is for you!
Introduction
Sarepta Studio and Teknopilot introduces My Child Lebensborn, a story-driven nurture game that allows you to experience what happens to the children in a post-war society. We, the player, adopt Karin/Klaus as our child in 1951 and must help them cope with events that happened to the children born of German soldiers during World War II in Norway.
I chose to take care of Karin, which is the name of the child I will refer to in this review for simplicity’s sake.
Mechanics
The mechanics of the game is easy – click, tap, and drag to make decisions to take care of Karin.
I bought this game on my phone, so the majority of my time was spent tapping away at the screen, but I cannot imagine it would be any different on the computer. If you played any pet/baby simulator – I don’t think you will have any trouble playing this game.
Overall, if you have ever played a tamagotchi or any pet/child simulation game, you have all the necessary knowledge to play My Child Lesbensborn. Like many of these games, you must balance your time and resources to provide for your child. In the game itself, there are a variety of tasks that we must do: take care of food, bathing, school, shopping, sewing their clothes, playing – the bare minimum for taking care of a child.
Apart from those basic tasks, we also give guidance to Karin when certain events happen to help Karin find the truth to all the hard questions; about their history, the hatred, bullying – the likes! It takes a village you know?
Narrative
I love to play games that have strong narratives – if you want to play a sad short story, this is it.
I stumbled across this game on TikTok, which has been my source of finding smaller, less-well known games as of late. (The TikTok algorithm baffles me to this day but I humbly submit to this clock app because it knows exactly what I want). Somehow, this was the game that had been overtaking my feed.
I got so many TikTok’s showing how cute Karin are when they show you what they drew, or the child’s cute reactions to the player getting them a gift.
But what really got me to purchase the game was because players started to fumble around certain parts of the game. Certain parts where I am now aggressively telling you – and the game also warns you before hand – there will be topics about bullying, hatred, and consequences of war.
For example, there is a point, later in the game, where I suspected that Karin experienced abuse. Part of me feared it was sexual abuse, but that was never outright confirmed. Karin’s teacher kept her after school for detention for almost a week, and stopped letting me feed her, bathe her, give her a hug, or even read her a bedtime story. I was, as a player, incredibly infuriated. I wanted to rescue this girl and protect her from the horrors of the in-game world.
Despite this, your child is still kind-hearted and smart – or as much as they could be considering the circumstances. The world in this game is full of awful people, but you as the player can always be there for her.
To think this is based on what happened to children post World War 2.
Final Thoughts
While I am a firm believer that we need an abundance more of wholesome-type games, I am also a believer that games can be a great interactive tool that can have its players interpret and look at topics with a critical lens.
If you would like to read more about the inspiration behind the game, here are some links that you can reference. They are fantastic reads on what the game studio wanted to represent.
Please support this game! Not only has this game been highly praised for its rich plot and genuine emotional experience, proceeds for purchasing this game also go to charity, which is always a plus in my book. 🙂
It is available on Steam, Google Play, and the App Store.
‘Till next time!
