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My Child Lebensborn is an immersive storytelling experience that focuses on the experience of raising a German-born child in Norway shortly after the events of World War 2. The game deals with the child's experiences in a society that blames them for the actions of Nazi Germany, the struggles of parenting as a poor adult, and other dark, emotional themes.
My Child Lebensborn is a game that's all about storytelling. In the game, you play the role of a factory worker who has adopted a German orphan in Norway not long after World War 2. Your countrymen see the German child and immediately associate them with the evils of Naziism. This means that your child is bullied at school and ostracized in public. Your goal is to attempt to be the best parent you can be in the face of adversity, prejudice, and ignorance.
My Child Lebensborn tells its story in the background of a gameplay loop that simulates the life of a factory worker. As the adult in the family, you have to go to work, buy food, cook meals, and spend time playing with and caring for your child. The game is incredibly thematic, and the art style, text, and choices reinforce the idea that you're poor and that putting food on the table reliably will be a sacrifice. As you get farther in the game, however, it becomes clear that this isn't the case. The developers of My Child Lebensborn deliberately crafted a game in which your decisions matter somewhat, but not on any sort of small scale. This means that money is in fact quite plentiful, your child will do okay if you skip playtime occasionally, and there's only a single ending to the game. As long as you make vaguely reasonable decisions you'll skate your way through the gameplay and make your way to the game's only ending.
Luckily, the point of the game isn't the gameplay. Instead, the gameplay only exists to reinforce the story. Working, shopping, cooking, and putting your child to bed add verisimilitude and help to reinforce the game's themes, especially with the high-quality art and great writing that get showcased with every scene. While you don't have a lot of control over how the story plays out, the story is evocative, emotional, and heart-wrenching. It's a wonderful experience that's been talked about across all of the internet because of its uniqueness and thought-provoking themes.
If there are any flaws to My Child Lebensborn, it's that the game slows down a little bit in the later stages. Given that the life-simulator loop is just a formality, you have to go through an unnecessary number of repetitions of daily Norwegian life to get through the last few sections of the story. The game isn't long enough for this to feel like an excessive grind, but it does feel like a bit of a chore that you have to do to get a thing you want. Expect to have to hunker down and mash activities at some point towards the end of your playthrough in order to finally get to the ending.
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My Child Lebensborn is a story-based game that's intentionally designed to be easy. The game's creators have gone out of their way to only include one ending. While your choices matter in the sense that they change how your child views life and how you interact with the story, as long as your kid doesn't run away from home, you'll get the same ending as everyone else. This means no secrets for you to find, no complex dialogue maps you have to follow, and no save scumming to get the best experience. Instead of playing this like a game to beat, you should focus on the emotional experience that the game provides and simply coast through the narrative, making decisions that make sense to you.
That said, you can get your child to run away if you ignore the game's systems for too long. Food is probably the most important thing to focus on in order to keep your child at home. Without regular meals, the kid will leave. Despite the in-game bars, the child doesn't really mind any of the foods presented in-game, although they will complain about oatmeal if you cook it too often. You do NOT need to purchase expensive foods or provide variety. Cooking food with your kid can help the two of you bond, but it's not necessary. All this does is raise your child's affection meter, which can be raised by patting their head.
Similarly, while you can play with your kid to raise their affection, you can also just pat their head. Bathing your child in a bath is generally a good idea, but the story will interfere with your ability to do this at some point, and it seems like you can go for a very, very long time without washing your child before they run away. Reading to your child is a good idea from an immersion, story, and tone perspective, but not only is this activity optional, you actually get an achievement by never doing it.
As you might imagine, playing My Child Lebensborn with optimization in mind gives you a totally different experience than the developer intended. If you feed your child oatmeal, skip bedtime stories, wash them only in the tub when you feel like it, and otherwise only interact by patting them on the head, you'll still skate through the story with no problems. In order to get the most out of the game, however, it's recommended that you do the opposite of this. Try to interact with your kid as much as you can, pretend that money is a limited resource, and participate in a variety of activities in order to see as many scenes as possible. You'll still get the game's only ending, but you'll have a lot more fun on the way. As far as achievements, it's probably a good idea to pretend that My Child Lebensborn doesn't have any in order to focus on the story and your interactions with the child in an honest, organic way.
Are you a My Child Lebensborn expert? What did you think of the story? Do you know what happened to the real-life children that inspired the game? Let us know in the comments below!
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