My Child Lebensborn is an immersive storytelling experience that focuses on the experience of raising a German-born child in Norway shortly after the events of World War 2. The game deals with the child's experiences in a society that blames them for the actions of Nazi Germany, the struggles of parenting as a poor adult, and other dark, emotional themes.

My Child Lebensborn is a game that's all about storytelling. In the game, you play the role of a factory worker who has adopted a German orphan in Norway not long after World War 2. Your countrymen see the German child and immediately associate them with the evils of Naziism. This means that your child is bullied at school and ostracized in public. Your goal is to attempt to be the best parent you can be in the face of adversity, prejudice, and ignorance.

My Child Lebensborn tells its story in the background of a gameplay loop that simulates the life of a factory worker. As the adult in the family, you have to go to work, buy food, cook meals, and spend time playing with and caring for your child. The game is incredibly thematic, and the art style, text, and choices reinforce the idea that you're poor and that putting food on the table reliably will be a sacrifice. As you get farther in the game, however, it becomes clear that this isn't the case. The developers of My Child Lebensborn deliberately crafted a game in which your decisions matter somewhat, but not on any sort of small scale. This means that money is in fact quite plentiful, your child will do okay if you skip playtime occasionally, and there's only a single ending to the game. As long as you make vaguely reasonable decisions you'll skate your way through the gameplay and make your way to the game's only ending.

Luckily, the point of the game isn't the gameplay. Instead, the gameplay only exists to reinforce the story. Working, shopping, cooking, and putting your child to bed add verisimilitude and help to reinforce the game's themes, especially with the high-quality art and great writing that get showcased with every scene. While you don't have a lot of control over how the story plays out, the story is evocative, emotional, and heart-wrenching. It's a wonderful experience that's been talked about across all of the internet because of its uniqueness and thought-provoking themes.

If there are any flaws to My Child Lebensborn, it's that the game slows down a little bit in the later stages. Given that the life-simulator loop is just a formality, you have to go through an unnecessary number of repetitions of daily Norwegian life to get through the last few sections of the story. The game isn't long enough for this to feel like an excessive grind, but it does feel like a bit of a chore that you have to do to get a thing you want. Expect to have to hunker down and mash activities at some point towards the end of your playthrough in order to finally get to the ending.