I am having an absolute blast playing Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. It’s got all the Nazi-fighting goodness of its predecessor (plus the added bonus of getting to fight the Ku Klux Klan too) buoyed by a stronger plot: In a world where the Nazis won World War II and have conquered the United States, it’s up to William Blazkowitz to liberate his homeland from the iron grip of General Engel. On its surface, it’s not too dissimilar from the first: gleeful, mindless Nazi punching. But liberating the US is no easy task and Blazko needs allies. It’s in pulling on the dual threads of what a Nazi-controlled US would look like and who’s fighting those Nazis that The New Colossus drops its apolitical veneer.
Blazko’s first lead takes him to New York. There, amidst the nuclear-bombed ruins of the Empire State Building he meets Grace Walker, the leader of the New York resistance. She is a Black woman with an impressive afro and bits of readable documents you find inform the player that she was already fighting for freedom before the Nazis came to America — fighting for Civil Rights and against the racist American norms. Though never referred to as such, the leather jackets, pinback buttons, and afros leave little doubt that Grace and the band of Black women she leads are members of an alternate Black Panther Party. In The New Colossus, the Americans fighting the Nazis are Black women from the Black Panthers, they are the ones who see the rise of fascism in America and refuse to roll over and take it.
Blazko’s anti-fascist crew is filled out by a ragtag multinational group. There’s Bombate, a Namibian freedom fighter, and Fergus, a grumpy Scotsman. Background characters are Finnish, Spanish, and Japanese, they’re from Latin America and the Middle East. It’s not just the Americans who fight the Nazis in this world — the resistance to fascism is a struggle that unites people from across the world in common cause. The bad guys are a bunch of Germans obsessed with Aryan racial purity, the good guys are a diverse group willing to set aside their differences. Even Blazko, our manly masculine hero of manliness, is fleshed out more in this game. Flashbacks reveal that despite an abusive father and growing up in 1920s Texas, Blazko was an empathetic kid who thought nothing about befriending a Black girl. The man who believes in the dream of America is shown to also be caring, someone who’s able to rise above the prejudice he was raised with to fight for a United States free of Nazis.
But what about the Nazis in America? The New Colossus reveals that though the majority of Americans have been cowed into submission by the overwhelming, science-fiction force of the Nazi army, there are collaborators who have benefited from the regime. One of those is Blazko’s own father, Rip. When we meet him he’s improved his station, having sold out neighbors, friends, and his own Jewish wife in exchange for a life of luxury. Rip shows little remorse in the face of Blazko’s anger, revealing during the confrontation that even then he’s luring the Nazis to find his fugitive son. The sort of person who would collaborate with Nazis is a despicable man, pathetic, selfish, and racist. But he’s also a man far too realistic, far too familiar to the United State’s recent history. Nazi ideals are not that foreign.
The Nazis in The New Colossus are also more firmly sketched out than in the prior game. Details around the world and overheard conversation reveal their actual ambitions besides world domination. They want to rid the world of subhuman and lesser races and create a paradise for the Aryan race. They explicitly call for the death of Jews and have created ghettos to exterminate the undesirables. The Nazis have brought back slavery and given control of the American South to the Ku Klux Klan. This time around the game doesn’t just use Nazism as a shorthand for a generic bad guy, instead, the game puts their reprehensible ideology on full displaying, showing the player just how monstrous they are. There’s no vagueness around why the Nazis are evil and why they should be fought.
The New Colossus came out in 2017, only two months after a bunch of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — so of course the game was labeled as ‘political.’ Nazis had indeed come to America and since then the specter of fascism in the US has continued to rise. In a day and age where an anti-fascist movement is labelled a terrorist group and programs advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion have become a boogeyman, a game that shows a diverse group of heroes fighting Nazis is going to feel like a political statement and what says is pretty darn clear: standing up against fascism and fighting Nazis is a good thing to do.
And man, does it feel good to fight Nazis in The New Colossus.
Essays, Not Rants! 