Kto je Helena?

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 as the character of 16-year-old Alice, who, together with her cousin Emil, in the game finds out the answers to the key questions of the family taboo:
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 come back?

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 space to take an individual attitude towards the information you learn. This is also why it is possible to achieve several different endings in it.

The game is waiting for you:
Extensive dialogues with family members in which every decision you make matters,
An episodic story you can keep coming back to
Two different game endings depending on your gameplay decisions,
The amount of visual material referring to the period of totality in Czechoslovakia,
Game encyclopedia, capturing the period of communism in the Czechoslovakia
During the game, you gather information about Helen and pass judgment on her actions:
Did she behave properly towards the family?
Was she entitled to emigrate?
Was it okay that she didn't talk to anyone anymore?

How do you feel about Helena?



The game was developed in cooperation with the Historical Institute of the SAS. It was created as part of the project A Shared Story: Slovak-US Relations Through the Lens of Migration in 20th Century, which was financially supported by the US Embassy in Bratislava.