Who is Helena? is a free story game that offers an excursion into the period of the totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia and shows a picture of family relationships marked by emigration to the USA.
Helena's story never happened, but it could have.
In this historically accurate game, you uncover the secret of the Dobšinský family marked by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. This secret is Helena. An ambitious scientist who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the USA during the Prague Spring in 1968 and never returned. Until…
The player plays the character of 16-year-old Alice, who, together with her cousin Emil, discovers the answers to key questions of family taboos in the game:
Who is Helena?
Why is Helena a family taboo?
Why did she emigrate from Czechoslovakia in 1968?
Where did she go and what happened to her?
Why did she never return?
How does the game work?
You get to know the game story through the character Alice and her mobile phone, through which you chat and email with various family members and old friends of the mysterious Helena. The game gives you the space to take an individual stance on the information you learn. That is why it is possible to achieve several different endings in it.
The game awaits you:
Extensive dialogues with family members, in which your every decision matters,
An episodic story that you can return to,
Two different endings of the game, depending on your game decisions,
A lot of visual material referring to the period of totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia,
A game encyclopedia, capturing the period of communism in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
During the game, you collect information about Helena and pass judgment on her actions:
Did she behave correctly towards her family?
Did she have the right to emigrate?
Was it okay that she didn't contact anyone anymore?
How will you stand with Helena?
The game was developed in cooperation with the Historical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. It was created as part of the project A Shared Story: Slovak-US Relations Through the Lens of Migration in the 20th Century, which was financially supported by the US Embassy in Bratislava.