About the Game
Justice requires courage. The courage to uncover truths that no one wants to see. The courage to confront former murderers who now wear suits and command respect. The courage to be threatened, ostracised or worse. And the courage to look into the darkness and be changed forever.
You are Esther Katz, a young prosecutor who has just joined Fritz Bauer's new special unit. Your task seems impossible: to investigate crimes committed years ago, where evidence has been destroyed, witnesses silenced and the perpetrators embedded in the highest ranks of society. Every decision matters. Every interrogation can bring you closer to the perpetrator or lead you astray. Silence is your worst enemy. Time is working against you. And German society is not ready to face its past.
In 1956, Fritz Bauer and his team of “Nazi hunters” demanded justice when everyone else demanded silence. A small team of prosecutors defying an entire nation. Criminals hiding in plain sight as respected citizens. Experience their dangerous struggle through the immersive investigations. Uncover truths a country has fought to keep buried. Challenge a society desperate to rewrite its own past.
Investigate two extensive cases based on true Nazi-era crimes
Interrogate witnesses and suspects, break through walls of silence and expose lies
Witness different versions of events through Esther's "mind's eye" as you perceive testimonies - which may be truthful, distorted, or deliberately false
Reconstruct events step by step from fragmented evidence and testimonies
Prosecute perpetrators in court with the right charges, where your investigative thoroughness will be put to the test
Shape the outcome with multiple endings - succeed in bringing justice or face the harsh reality of a perpetrator walking free
Explore Esther's story, her past and her relationships with family, colleagues and the iconic Fritz Bauer
Immerse yourself in stunning cell-shaded 3D graphics inspired by 1950s pulp comics, complete with comic panels that reflect the era
Listen to full English voice acting bringing every character to life
Screenshots
15 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
Hi folks,
We just updated The Darkest Files to fix the issue where some of you weren't getting the "Silver Tongue" achievement. We really appreciate your patience with this one 🧡
Also, the VFX that disappeared in the last version are back!
[img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42791427/996576d84c16691e008546db7d166664c73cf3c9.png"]
Thank you to everyone who reported the bug and helped us to find the issue! If you still encounter any bugs, we’re definitely interested in knowing about them. Don’t hesitate to press F5 in-game and write a quick report, so we can fix it as soon as possible.
Love,
The Paintbuckets
Dear prosecutors!
We’ve been made aware by some of you that it wasn’t possible to load a savegame in the epilogue-chapter since our last patch. This was a result of a bugfix related to the Notebook.
So, today we’re pushing a hotfix that lets you load epilogue-savegames again.
Thank you very much for the bug reports about this! If you still encounter any bugs, we’re definitely interested in knowing about them! So don’t hesitate to press F5 and write a quick report, so we can fix it as soon as possible.
See you in court!
Your Paintbucket team.
View on Steam
We’ve been made aware by some of you that it wasn’t possible to load a savegame in the epilogue-chapter since our last patch. This was a result of a bugfix related to the Notebook.
So, today we’re pushing a hotfix that lets you load epilogue-savegames again.
Thank you very much for the bug reports about this! If you still encounter any bugs, we’re definitely interested in knowing about them! So don’t hesitate to press F5 and write a quick report, so we can fix it as soon as possible.
See you in court!
Your Paintbucket team.
Hey dear prosecutors,
It is patch time again! This is a relatively small update that fixes a couple of minor issues and a couple of spelling errors. Something bigger is in the making, read the end of the note for more info on what we are cooking.
We are currently working on porting the game to the Nintendo Switch. In order to get the game running on the Switch, we are making some adjustments to asset loading and graphics. We will be bringing most of these optimizations to the Steam version in the future as well. These changes will lead to a lower memory requirement, and should stop weaker systems from crashing when loading into cases.
Since these changes need time and extensive testing, they are not part of this update yet - but will be in a coming one. Stay tuned :)
View on Steam
It is patch time again! This is a relatively small update that fixes a couple of minor issues and a couple of spelling errors. Something bigger is in the making, read the end of the note for more info on what we are cooking.
Changes & Fixes
- Updated the “Report a bug” menu with additional (optional) input fields for email and discord user names. You can fill these out when submitting a bug report if you want us to allow us to get in touch with you regarding further details.
- Fixed a bug in the main menu which resulted in certain options not being selectable with a controller, in languages other than English.
- Fixed a bug which resulted in Characters from The Insurgent appearing inside the Notebook during The Looter
- Fixed various spelling errors in English and German
Not in this patch yet: Optimization & Nintendo Switch
We are currently working on porting the game to the Nintendo Switch. In order to get the game running on the Switch, we are making some adjustments to asset loading and graphics. We will be bringing most of these optimizations to the Steam version in the future as well. These changes will lead to a lower memory requirement, and should stop weaker systems from crashing when loading into cases.
Since these changes need time and extensive testing, they are not part of this update yet - but will be in a coming one. Stay tuned :)
Hello, dear prosecutors!
We once again have a new patch for you to make some improvements, fix bugs, typos and grammar issues reported by you all. Thank you very much for all the reports when you find bugs. They really help us a lot to make The Darkest Files the best it can be as we continue supporting the game. If you encounter a bug or any inconvenience while playing the game, don’t hesitate to press F5 and write a bug report.
We are also on a continuous quest to make major performance optimizations which will make the game run on much less powerful hardware via a future patch so if you’ve been getting game crashes, rest assured that we’re on the case!
Changes
View on Steam
We once again have a new patch for you to make some improvements, fix bugs, typos and grammar issues reported by you all. Thank you very much for all the reports when you find bugs. They really help us a lot to make The Darkest Files the best it can be as we continue supporting the game. If you encounter a bug or any inconvenience while playing the game, don’t hesitate to press F5 and write a bug report.
We are also on a continuous quest to make major performance optimizations which will make the game run on much less powerful hardware via a future patch so if you’ve been getting game crashes, rest assured that we’re on the case!
Changes
- Improved the viewing angle when in a kitchen talk with Simon Peters
- Fixed missing comic panel text in Naumann case
- Fixed an issue where the bullet hole and the graffiti above the mattress in the insurgent case were not highlighted
- Added Instagram Button to Startscreen
- Fixed Paula and Christoph dialogues showing up in the office instead of the kitchen area
- Disabled reconstruction blueprint in the epilogue
- Fixed an issue where the name of the cat Marlene had a blank space after her written name in dialogues
- Made the bigger font sizes slightly smaller
- Polished the artwork of the Looter chapter selection screen
- Added a phone symbol to Looter blueprint
- Switched out english environment texture
- Fixed a bug which could lead to the game getting stuck during court
- Optimized graphics memory usage so the game can run on more systems. This might prevent some crashes on lower-end hardware
- Fixed a bug where you would only receive the second half of a certain character’s diary
- Fixed some typos in the English and French versions
- Fixed a lot of typos and grammatical errors in the German version
Hello, dear prosecutors!
Today, we've got a new patch for you. This patch contains improvements to the notebook and adds a certain detail in a document to make things a little more consistent.
We’ve also fixed all the most urgent and some more minor bugs and issues that you all have reported to us on the forums, our discord server, or the in-game bug report tool which can be opened via F5.
Thank you very much to everyone who has been reporting issues in the game to us. Your reports enable us to improve the experience for everyone. We are still supporting this game with fixes and always look at every new bug report coming in, so if you find any issue in the game, we’d be grateful if you could press F5 and write a quick note describing the issue.
Thanks again for all the continued support,
See you in court!
View on Steam
Today, we've got a new patch for you. This patch contains improvements to the notebook and adds a certain detail in a document to make things a little more consistent.
We’ve also fixed all the most urgent and some more minor bugs and issues that you all have reported to us on the forums, our discord server, or the in-game bug report tool which can be opened via F5.
Thank you very much to everyone who has been reporting issues in the game to us. Your reports enable us to improve the experience for everyone. We are still supporting this game with fixes and always look at every new bug report coming in, so if you find any issue in the game, we’d be grateful if you could press F5 and write a quick note describing the issue.
Thanks again for all the continued support,
See you in court!
Changes
- Made certain documents more consistent in the Insurgent Case. (Thanks, Staiy!)
- Various updates to the notebook related to font sizes, spacing, etc
- Updated some notebook glossary entries, changed the layout to be one entry per page instead of three per page.
- Changed the UI font size setting names to be more in line with what they actually are (from Small, Medium, Big to Default, Big, Huge (experimental).
- Did a leveling pass to make sure Paula is always loud enough to understand her properly.
- Made controller stick scrolling faster in the dialogue log.
- Updated petition to add one backer name.
- Updated 3D magazine textures, so the fashion, sport & people magazines look distinct.
Fixes
- Fixed the game breaking in unexpected ways when opening the steam overlay.
- Fixed an issue where a letter would not be translated inside the document detail view in French and German.
- Fixed a bug which prevents the game from being auto saved before leaving for court.
- Fixed an issue which could lead to showing not yet obtained documents using a controller.
- Fixed an issue which could lead to not being able to add labels to paragraphs while playing in Story Mode.
- Fixed certain objects not being highlighted in some of the memory sequences in the Looter Case.
- Fixed an issue where character pages in the notebook were duplicated.
- Fixed a bug which prevents the game from being auto saved, before leaving for court.
- Fixed an issue where a dialogue on the following day would not continue if you choose to search Heidi.
- Fixed wrongly displayed interrogation max count in the case summary.
- Fixed text display issue in french version in personal information by making the text field bigger.
- Various fixes related to texts in the game across all supported languages.
This is a major balance patch which adds a lot of possible solutions for conclusions and interruptions, making the game less strict and more open to different ways of thinking. We also added a new difficulty mode in between the easy and hard difficulty for a more balanced experience.
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42791427/618c0b535e1eec0b17cca17f47f0c198662ce67d.png
Dear prosecutors,
After watching a lot of you play and make reviews and community posts regarding the game’s difficulty, we’ve carefully taken notes and created a major balancing patch. The game is a lot less strict about what it considers the correct solution now as we’ve added many alternative combinations for conclusions as well as many more alternative correct solutions for interruptions during witness interviews. Many of the steps can be solved with more ways of thinking than we realized initially, and this patch addresses this.
Furthermore, after watching people struggle with the difficulty selection between only an easy-mode and a hard mode, we’ve now added a normal difficulty mode in between. The new mode in the middle no longer requires you to select individual paragraphs. This should hopefully make the game more approachable for those who want a bit of a challenge without wanting to choose the highest possible difficulty.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this new update and are looking forward to reading your feedback about the new difficulty mode and newly accepted solutions.
As with all updates, it can happen that new bugs are introduced, even though we thoroughly tested every newly added solution. So, if you encounter any bugs while playing, we’d be very grateful if you could report them by pressing F5 while in game.
See you in court!
Your Paintbucket team.
View on Steam
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42791427/618c0b535e1eec0b17cca17f47f0c198662ce67d.png
Dear prosecutors,
After watching a lot of you play and make reviews and community posts regarding the game’s difficulty, we’ve carefully taken notes and created a major balancing patch. The game is a lot less strict about what it considers the correct solution now as we’ve added many alternative combinations for conclusions as well as many more alternative correct solutions for interruptions during witness interviews. Many of the steps can be solved with more ways of thinking than we realized initially, and this patch addresses this.
Furthermore, after watching people struggle with the difficulty selection between only an easy-mode and a hard mode, we’ve now added a normal difficulty mode in between. The new mode in the middle no longer requires you to select individual paragraphs. This should hopefully make the game more approachable for those who want a bit of a challenge without wanting to choose the highest possible difficulty.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this new update and are looking forward to reading your feedback about the new difficulty mode and newly accepted solutions.
As with all updates, it can happen that new bugs are introduced, even though we thoroughly tested every newly added solution. So, if you encounter any bugs while playing, we’d be very grateful if you could report them by pressing F5 while in game.
See you in court!
Your Paintbucket team.
Difficulty & Balance
- Adjusted the difficulty of Investigator Mode to make it a little easier. (Removed the requirement to specify the paragraph in a given document, and enabled the counter in the testimonies that shows how many optional interactables have been found).
From the feedback we received, we feel that this more closely reflects the kind of "normal" difficulty that people are looking for - whereas in our minds, "Investigator Mode" was always designed to be "Hard Mode". - Added a new difficulty setting, "Prosecutor Mode", which is the former Investigator Mode aka "Hard Mode".
- Added a lot more documents & paragraphs as possible solutions for interruptions and conclusions.
- Removed Esther's misleading comments when combining documents into conclusions.
Graphics
- Changed the used Anti-aliasing method(s) from MSAA + SMAA (Medium) to just SMAA (Quality), resulting in a sharper image and higher framerates on certain systems.
Fixes
- Fixed an issue where the interruption UI would display its animations abnormally.
- Fixed Theresa being called Edwina in the court opening cutscene of the second case.
- Fixed a bug which can lead to players being stuck when entering a coworkers office.
- Fixed various typos and grammatical errors in all languages in the game.
Thank you for your continued support! We're excited to bring you this new update with several improvements and bug fixes:
Changes
Bugfixes
We appreciate your feedback as we continue improving your experience. See you in court!
View on Steam
Changes
- Changed the unlock requirements of the "Fledgeling" and "Respectable Result" so they can be unlocked when having more of the required steps to unlock.
Bugfixes
- Fixed an issue where the achievements "Silver Tongue" & "Argumentative" would not unlock
- Fixed an issue which prevents an epilogue Save game to load, which has been used to play through other cases
- Fixed an issue where opening the Steam Overlay with the default binding also opened the ingame Radial Menu.
- Fixed an issue where the Interruption could get clicked away instantly.
- Fixed an issue where the research option for Call Protocols wouldn't trigger properly in Emilia Becker's and Otto Wagner's Testimony
- Fixed an issue where the option to ask Paula about Peters would sometimes not appear properly in the evening of Insurgent Day 2
- Fixed an issue which would prevent the 6th conclusion to be counted as correct inside the looter court
- Fixed an issue that led to the wrong conclusion being displayed in court, when a player is going to court directly after setting up their conclusions, and then answers the first question wrongly.
- Fixed an issue which would result in not getting all documents from the inbox when clicking too fast
- Fixed an issue which would prevent an epilogue save game to be loaded
We appreciate your feedback as we continue improving your experience. See you in court!
Thank you for your continued support! After our larger update on Thursday, we're releasing this small patch to address the most troublesome bugs:
We have found a reason why some people have not received a particular document after ordering it from Paula. We are working on a fix for this, but for now we would ask you not to click too quickly when interacting with the inbox.
We appreciate your patience and feedback as we continue to improve your experience. See you in court!
View on Steam
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a rare issue where the court would abruptly end when selecting any answer other than "No one planted the loot"
- Resolved a bug where certain paragraphs in Investigator mode weren't being counted as correct answers despite being valid
- Added several more valid solution options in the Insurgent case
- Fixed an issue where verdicts could be displayed incorrectly in the game summary at the end of the Looter case
- Corrected a problem where Emilia and Wagner's verdicts were sometimes swapped at the conclusion of the Looter case
We have found a reason why some people have not received a particular document after ordering it from Paula. We are working on a fix for this, but for now we would ask you not to click too quickly when interacting with the inbox.
We appreciate your patience and feedback as we continue to improve your experience. See you in court!
Thank you for all the amazing support and many positive reviews. We’re extremely grateful to have such a lovely community of players enjoying our game.
Since our launch on Tuesday, a lot of people have played the game for the first time and of course found and reported various issues and bugs. We aim to make sure that every bug and most inaccuracies in the game will be ironed out so that The Darkest Files is the best game it can be.
In this first patch, we’ve fixed plenty of issues related to UI, corrected errors people found in our localisation, updated contents and prevented various ways to get stuck or miss out on crucial features.
We will continue fixing all issues we encountered so far and might encounter in the following weeks. So, if you find an issue, it would help us immensely, if you could use the bug report feature by pressing F5 and writing a short description of what is wrong.
We are also happy to discuss anything regarding the game on our Discord.
See the full change log below:
View on Steam
Since our launch on Tuesday, a lot of people have played the game for the first time and of course found and reported various issues and bugs. We aim to make sure that every bug and most inaccuracies in the game will be ironed out so that The Darkest Files is the best game it can be.
In this first patch, we’ve fixed plenty of issues related to UI, corrected errors people found in our localisation, updated contents and prevented various ways to get stuck or miss out on crucial features.
We will continue fixing all issues we encountered so far and might encounter in the following weeks. So, if you find an issue, it would help us immensely, if you could use the bug report feature by pressing F5 and writing a short description of what is wrong.
We are also happy to discuss anything regarding the game on our Discord.
See the full change log below:
User Interface
- Made many comic panels not block UI elements.
- Updated conclusions hint menu with a few minor tweaks and fixes.
- Resolved a UI bug with the notebook navigation arrows appearing when they shouldn’t.
- Resolved a UI bug in the difficulty settings.
- Added buttons to socials in the main menu.
Localisation
- Corrected about 40 spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors in the German localisation
- Added 2 missing lines in the French localization
- Added translations for the real case summaries
Updated Content
- Characters from the kitchen won’t suddenly disappear now when leaving the kitchen after a conversation, but only after Esther has left the room.
- Updated comic panel and magazine graphics.
- Added missing kickstarter backer names to the petition.
- Fixed errors in certain newspapers and documents to make the game more historically accurate
Temporary Changes
- Temporarily removed the “dialogue autoplay” accessibility option since it is causing issues with interruptions not showing up.
Bugfixes
- Fixed an issue where wrong clues would be displayed for the 6th question inside the court.
- Fixed an issue where the Petting the Cat Achievement was not being triggered.
- Fixed an issue where the Behind the facade Achievement was not being triggered.
- Fixed the fallen stool interaction in Schickert's testimony.
- Fixed a bug where the player would keep on walking with certain accessibility options enabled while a menu is open.
- Fixed blueprint character “actors” appearing in the office.
- Fixed players getting stuck after the blueprint tutorial with Christoph in the Insurgent case by disabling the undo, redo and playback options during the tutorial.
- Fixed a bug, where the Headline and the description of all Profile Magazines would show the wrong name and person.
Current Release
Not available
System Requirements
OS
Windows 10
CPU
x64
RAM
8 GB RAM
GPU
Dedicated graphics card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or equivalent (Onboard/integrated graphics not supported)
How to Install
1
Download all files
2
Extract the .RAR file to a folder (use WinRAR or 7-Zip)
3
Run The Darkest Files.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Size
1.1 GB
Password: cracked-games.org or 123
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Download The Darkest Files for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of The Darkest Files for free. The Darkest Files is a Adventure released by Paintbucket Games.