Game: Kill Baby Hitler
Developer: Jacklehamster
Platform: Browser
Here's a question I'm sure you've probably gotten asked in the past year or so: would you go back in time to kill baby Adolf Hitler? Now, I'm sure you already have your personal answer that you are most eager to share. My answer is "no" because of how little we understand how time travel works on a fundamental level. There almost always seems to be this notion in pop culture that reality will fix itself when something in the past is altered thanks in part to time travel movies like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Movies like these and their concepts of how time travel "works" are so ingrained in the pop culture consciousness that we often just assume that that's how time travel works when in reality time travel is already such an out there concept that we have no idea how the rules of it would work. I think I've gone on a bit of a tangent talking about our misunderstanding of time travel when I should be discussing a little something I forgot I had in my itch.io browser app game library. A little visual novel that looks to bring this discussion back into the light and have a little bit more of a mature discussion on the matter.
Kill Baby Hitler is a visual novel microgame developed by Jacklehamster. The premise has you being assigned a mission to go back in time to kill Adolf Hitler. This mission, should you accept it, has a catch though. The only way you can kill your target is going back to the year 1889, the year Hitler was born, and kill your target when he was only a baby. Do you accept the mission and its risks and kill baby Hitler?
I'm surprised by how little fanfare this game got at the second spike of the kill baby Hitler controversy. Then again, itch.io is not exactly a gaming giant like Steam or a huge social media platform like Twitter. I guess when it comes to games as an art form, some sort of expect games to be grand and in your face about its message, like Spec Ops: The Line does with the morality of war. I'm not exactly trying to say Kill Baby Hitler is super nuanced in its message, but it does bring more intellectual maturity to the discussion than say a post on Twitter that seeks to virtue signal to the "obvious" choice of the matter. With Nazism being a hot button topic nowadays, approaching the issue with maturity is certainly needed, as opposed to demonizing either side of the political aisle just because their beliefs don't 100% line up with your own.
But I digress. How is the game itself? I'm not really a fan of visual novel type games, just to get this out of the way. I'll spare you the details and just say they aren't necessarily my thing. Kill Baby Hitler is thankfully pretty short and to the point on its subject matter. According to the developer, there are 4 possible endings, and I've gotten 3 of them so far. I also like the detail that before you have the option of killing infant Hitler or not, you can draw a Hitler-stache on the baby itself for a little comedic effect. The straightforward ending is killing baby Hitler. Doing so causes reality to warp, saving millions of lives at the cost of your existence. A small price to pay for the good of humanity, depending on how you look at it. You can also choose not to kill baby Hitler in a couple of ways. One is by shooting at anything but the baby himself, or by refusing to take the gun in the beginning.
I do kind of wish that this visual novel got a little more attention at the height of the topic's popularity, but I'm not entirely sure that it would have stifled some of the political immaturity from either side. I'm not saying it would have been a catalyst, I'm just saying not much would probably change. This game doesn't really change my answer of whether or not I would kill baby Hitler, but it was a short and surprisingly enjoyable experience. Play this game if you want, and I've got to work on getting that last ending.
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