Forest of the Gods
A historical story game after Balys Sruoga’s book – to read, to understand, to remember.
Forest of the Gods (in Lithuanian, Dievų miškas) is a historical 2D story and exploration game for Android based on Balys Sruoga’s book “Dievų miškas”. In March 1943 the Nazis took 46 Lithuanian intellectuals hostage – the writer among them – and sent them to the Stutthof concentration camp. In 1945, after the war, Sruoga wrote one of the best-known books about the camp; Soviet censorship kept it from print until 1957, ten years after his death.
The game follows that path in a prologue, twelve chapters and an epilogue: explore the places of the time, read documents, talk with the archivist of a present-day reading room and put events, places and texts in order in quiet puzzles. Eighteen optional episodes go further – the other hostages, the letters home and their hidden language, Lithuanian Jews in Stutthof, the secret Masses, the evacuation by sea, the road to Sweden, the trials and the book’s new translations – and a glossary explains the camp’s words. Every card says whether it is a historical fact, literature, a reconstruction or the makers’ interpretation, and every fact names its sources in the game’s historical archive. The people who were held in Stutthof – Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Norwegians and many others – are remembered too.
It is not a survival game: there are no points, rewards or meters tied to suffering. The game is in Lithuanian and English, has no purchases and no account, and the whole story plays offline. It is free: a small ad banner is shown only in the menus – never while a story is being read or played.