Velvet Assassin is a stealth action game inspired by the life of Allied agent Violette Szabo. Dropped behind enemy lines in 1944, Szabo helped the French Resistance until she was captured and executed by the Nazis. In the game, the heroine is hospitalized and comatose. You play out her memories as she relives some of the things she has seen and done.

The emphasis here is on stealth. The heroine is invisible in the shadows or tall grass, from where she can strike with her knife. Close kills like this are the execution method of choice since they are silent and more effective than guns, which don’t necessarily kill your targets unless you get them in the head. Sound is, so far, treated inconsistently. Walking on broken glass could clue in the Nazis to your presence, rattling a fence as you climb it will not, so long as you climb it in the shadows.

The hospitalization conceit comes into play with “morphine time”. If you are surrounded or in trouble, you take a hit of morphine. Things become hazy, your heroine changes from WW2 secret spy to a lady in a hospital night dress, and everything around you moves more slowly. It’s a way to spice up the combat but still remain relatively true to a period stealth title.

Replay Studios is aiming for a realistic WW2 setting, or at least as realistic as a German studio can manage. There are no swastikas, but otherwise the uniforms are appropriate to the time and place. Aerial photography of 1940s Warsaw was used to get many of the details of the Warsaw Ghetto level right. Knowing the history of the place gives you a little chill as you crawl through a hole in a fence and see a cluster of dead bodies.