Violette Szabo’s life story is so strikingly unlikely it could only be true: widowed in 1942, the perfume counter salesgirl immediately became an Allied secret agent and was parachuted into occupied France to help with resistance efforts. Her second mission ended with her capture, torture, rape, internment in a concentration camp and subsequent execution in 1945. She was 23. She’s back from the dead now, however, as inspiration for Violette Summer, saboteur heroine of Velvet Assassin.

At a recent developer walkthrough, Replay announced that it sees Violette as the antidote to unrealistic, oversexed videogame cybervixens everywhere, before flipping PowerPoint slides to reveal the plucky resistance heroine in two highly functional outfits: a skin-tight leather catsuit and a rather fetching thigh-length nightie.

It’s enough to make you suspect that Szabo may have died in vain, but a deeper look at the game behind the wardrobe suggests otherwise. Velvet Assassin’s story is told in flashbacks, as Summer slips in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed. The setting is carefully indistinct, however, hinting that some manner of Second Sight trickery may be afoot as the plot progresses.

The main bulk of the game certainly seems to be more conventional. After the hospital, we’re shown a mission set in Warsaw, occurring about halfway through the story, in which Summer must make her way to a Nazi-held prison, delivering a cyanide pill to a captured colleague. It’s a promisingly downbeat agenda, perfectly matched with the ruined autumnal city, a carefully planned minefield of enemy patrols and deep shadow. The latter is a natural ally, and the game projects a violet haze around Summer when she’s hidden. It’s a binary system – she’s either safe or spotted – and works well with the back-to-basics design.

Replay has chosen to trade AI realism for a toybox solidity: these soldiers have short memories when it comes to leather-clad sex-bomb insurgents, and the rigid paths they follow are there to turn every encounter into a puzzle. It’s not the most ambitious agenda, then, but it pander’s brilliantly to the obsessive-compulsive’s craving for experimentation and route optimization. The focus of the demo, an unexpected roadblock with four patrolling guards, proves a case in point: risk sneaking past, pick them off one at a time, or try pulling the pin from a passing soldier’s grenade, timing it to take out his colleagues with the blast? It’s contrived, certainly, but also full of potential.

On top of this is Summer’s fondness for morphine, a burst of which can temporarily freeze time, letting you find a better hiding spot, or even move in for a stealth kill. In a nod to the over-arching structure, it also briefly transforms Summer back into that nightie, and sends a blotchy blast of blood cells swimming across the screen.

Replay’s ultimate aim is to provide a more personal window into World War II. “Have you seen Schindler’s List?” the Gamecock representative running the demo asks, trying to sum up the developer’s approach as he guides his leather-jumpsuited, purple-mist-enshrouded supermodel Power Ranger through a Krypton-green sewer. We have, as it happens, and it didn’t look a lot like Velvet Assassin. But that’s not necessarily a problem, because Velvet Assassin still looks a lot more interesting and original than many of our recent forays into Nazi Germany.