Ok, I'm finally playing through this, and am seriously impressed. This game is unbelievable.

I especially wanted to share something that blew me away, even though in the beginning I thought it will be rote as hell.

When Anya starts reading Ramona's diary as audio logs, at first I thought I won't listen to them all, because who cares. But they really started capturing my attention, increasingly with each one. Until in the 17th one she mentions nursing people and digging dirt for artifacts... and then it hit me - it was actually her diary. And the shit she's been through... jesus. Some of the best storytelling I've seen in quite a while.

I can't wait to finish this game, but even now it's a contender for game of the year... or even more. A classic.

Interesting tidbit:

The real author of the diary is essentially spelled out to someone who knows Polish - in the audiolog picture of Anya holding it, the front cover of the diary says "Należy do", which means "Belongs to", and you can clearly see the letters A, N and Y.

BTW, the fact that they went ahead and got native speakers to actually record lines in the specific languages is probably my favorite thing about this entire game. Instead of going the usual route of getting, I dunno, Jennifer Hale to talk in English with a half-assed accent, they hired a real Polish actress for the role of Anya. Same thing with reading Polish letters and signs on walls which are actually written in normal Polish, not some Google Translate bullshit. Fantastic attention to detail that every AAA dev should ape.

Also, kudos to Brian Bloom for his delivery of the few Polish lines he says in this game. Made a great performance even better, because he did his homework.

Yeah, and all the German on the walls seems correct, at least to my middling knowledge of the language.

And NOW I'm on the freaking moon! And the music is astounding.

I'll have to replay this to collect everything.

It's a really great game. I just thought the final boss was kind of a bummer from a design perspective - I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to do in that fight.

As someone fluent in Polish (parents are Polish, got taught the language when I was very young), the way people spoke Polish without a trace of an accent really caught me off-guard because it was in such a large game, it was really well done. And even though I was not born there, I still feel a certain connection to Poland, so it was nice to see it and it's people having a slightly larger role than "that country that got invaded first by the Nazis".

Also, there are many small story details and references that are very clever.

Like Set Roth calling you Shimshon - another name for Sampson. And Bobby being a jerk to Blazkowicz in the beginning. I feel he realized what he was going to have to do, and didn't want to connect too much to anyone.

I'm sure after finishing the game I'll replay it and find something else. Didn't even thoroughly read all the newspaper clippings.

It's pretty clear this was made by former Starbreeze guys, because Escape from Butcher Bay is one of my favorite games of all time.

@dr_mantas: The game if full of details of lore and interesting stuff. I loved the Audio recordings, and as far as I can recall, at the end Anya admits that it was her diary all along. You know I love little details like that, kind of gives use a better view of what the characters have been through. Like for instance, the fact that Anya wasn't able to directly tell William the shit she has been through kind of tells us how she has been scarred by The Nazi's, and why she was so willing to put her life in harms way to save others, in a way she is just as pissed as B.J.

And then there are multiple articles that tell us about the abominations The Nazi's have created, and how horrifically they kill innocent people. If I remember correctly, before breaking Fergus out of Prison I read how one of the huge Mechadogs devoured an escapee, and the guards couldn't get the poor bastards out of the muts mouth.

Game's fantastic, and there's a ton of world-building outside of the main narrative. Lots of environmental storytelling in the base, especially.

On a side note, I was born in Poland. Hearing people just start talking normal Polish really caught me off guard. I was going to call my parents over to show them how worldly games are.

This really got me interested in playing Syndicate. How is it as a single player game? This was during the Starbreeze transition so I don't know how much of Starbreeze was still on board. I know Jeff fought for its greatness, but I'm curious how much of that was because of co-op.

Wolfenstein is such a heavy contender for Game of the Year for me at this point, it will be extremely tough for something else to dethrone it. I hadn't listened to any of the audio logs until I saw this thread and WOW was I missing out on some great content.