Cold War Physics in the Middle of Nowhere
It’s 1967. The space race is turning astronauts into celebrities, the student protests are beginning to boil in the streets of West Berlin, and somewhere in the fictional German provinces, an American physics student named Hans Tannhauser has just arrived in a town called Trüberbrook—a spa resort he’s never heard of, for a contest he doesn’t remember entering. His luggage barely hits the floor at the Pension Waldeslust before someone breaks in and steals his research notes. That’s the setup for Trüberbrook, a hand-crafted point-and-click adventure that looks like a watercolor painting and plays like the best kind of slow-burn paperback.
What the developers built is something genuinely unusual: the environments are actual physical miniature sets, photographed and digitized, which gives every scene a warmth and tangibility that purely digital work rarely achieves. The Pension Waldeslust, Tannhauser’s lodgings at the center of the village, has the feel of a place that smells like old wood and damp towels. The villagers he meets—a cast of eccentrics, each stranger than the last—feel like they belong to this specific invented geography rather than any generic fantasy world.
Nora Tschirner voices Greta Lemke, the young scientist who becomes Hans’s unlikely ally, and the casting is exactly right. Tschirner has done voice work across a range of animated productions—the German dub of Princess Merida in Brave, Lara Croft across the Tomb Raider games—and there’s a quality in her delivery, something between warmth and barely-contained impatience, that makes even expository dialogue feel inhabited. Opposite her, Jan Böhmermann—Germany’s sharpest late-night provocateur—plays the antagonist Dr. Heinrich von Streck. Whether that casting is inspired or chaotic probably depends on how much of Böhmermann’s television persona you’re carrying in with you. I’m carrying a lot.
The mystery of why Tannhauser is really in Trüberbrook—the stolen notes, the cryptic messages, the creeping sense that a conspiracy runs through the town’s foundations—unfolds against that Cold War backdrop in a way that earns the scale. What starts as something small and personal ends, apparently, with the fate of the world. Point-and-click adventures live or die by whether their world is interesting enough to make you slow down, look at every pixel, try every dialogue option twice. The 1967 German provinces, rendered in miniature and saturated with a specific kind of provincial unease, seem like exactly the right place to do that.