A good psychological horror thriller is like wine: it only gets better over the years. I clearly remember Visage and The Beast Inside – small masterpieces that gave a storm of emotions at the moment of passing and left warm memories. Can the freshly made thriller KARMA: The Dark World from Pollard Studio LLC leave the same impressions? Waking up in a hospital ward, we find a pile of corpses with suspiciously identical appearances. A little later, we meet an old man in a wheelchair who, talking utter rubbish, chains us to a chair and mutters that this time it might work.
Having barely begun, KARMA: The Dark World leaves a lot of questions and openly hints that the story won’t be easy.
KARMA takes place in an alternative East Germany in 1984. We find ourselves in a dystopia ruled by the Leviathan mega-corporation with an eye-shaped logo, where constant surveillance, clear class divisions, the poisoning of people’s minds and total fear of their place have become commonplace. Remember when we used to joke about ‘zombie TV’? Well, people here have televisions instead of heads.
We play as Daniel McGovern, a man with an unusual profession – a travel agent. In KARMA, there is also a place for technology that was ahead of its time: using a bulky helmet, the travellers can enter the minds of the accused and live through their life episodes, which helps them to interrogate and judge them. These devices are a cross between steampunk and cyberpunk.
We have another case to investigate – a certain employee, Sean, has broken the rules by attempting to use a forbidden machine to send messages to Leviathan. Before we interrogate the dangerous criminal, we’ll explore the place where it all happened. It’s hard to tell the story any further without spoilers, so we’ll stick to this general introduction.
KARMA: The Dark World is a linear game that tells a single story. It is divided into three acts, which will take a maximum of 8 hours to play through. That’s not a lot, but in that time it manages to be a detective thriller, a creepy horror and a personal, heartbreaking drama-tragedy.
Apart from the main plot, KARMA also tells little stories that touch on various themes. The very dangerous criminal who supposedly broke the rules meets a rather unfortunate fate, and thanks to the local technology, we survive it completely. Every now and then, there are notes telling equally disturbing stories of people who have had to deal with a totalitarian regime.
I am sure that the stories they tell are real: people are afraid of losing their jobs, of having to obey stupid rules, of being put in difficult life situations that reveal the nature of their loved ones. Each of us will be able to interpret these mini-stories in our own way.
In terms of gameplay, KARMA: The Dark World is a wanderer with puzzle elements and a dash of action. The game can hardly be called a horror, as only one episode is frightening. Otherwise, it is more of a thriller, with most of the time taken up by the hero’s personal drama, interspersed with logical puzzles.
I can’t call the gameplay ‘smooth’ and sustained: most of the puzzles are elementary to the point of humiliation (key points are highlighted right in the text of the notes), and a variety of game mechanics occur almost once or twice during the entire narrative. There’s a sense of rambling. Even though most of this is explained in the finale, it still leaves a mixed aftertaste.
However, if the story puzzles are simple enough, then the collection puzzles will require a lot of work. In KARMA: The Dark World, there are hidden boxes containing various geometric, mathematical and logical problems.
When I found the first one, it took me an hour to complete the game, eventually using a hint from the Internet. Other puzzles of this kind were simpler, but their contrast is visible to the naked eye. Oh, and collecting items from such boxes is only necessary to get the achievement.
Sometimes, the game changes dramatically: it becomes a three-dimensional geometric puzzle or a two-dimensional maze.
You can feel David Lynch’s abstract style as you play through the game. As we delve into the minds of the alleged criminals, be prepared to see madness on screen: we often wander through places that defy logic and physics, where something indescribable happens. It makes sense, though, because these are all people’s emotions at certain moments, and in them, you can unravel their experiences.
The psychedelic adventure looks great, thanks to the photorealistic graphics created with Unreal Engine 5 and Lumen and Nanite technologies. The title looks fantastic: not only the overall scenery but also various small details. In the game, it’s quite easy to read inscriptions on book spines, newspaper headlines or scratched clues on some objects.
It is a pleasure to look at all these details. They show the difficult life of the people in this fictional state.
Interestingly, the authors often play with the colour palette to reflect the mood of the characters. For example, when we travel through the mind of Sean, one of the suspects, everything turns red in moments of anxiety, and the finale of his story is painted in ‘dead’ black and white, suggesting that something irreparable has happened.
The music is also excellent. It creates an unsettling mood when the protagonist is in danger and a dramatic mood in the moments when light is shed on events. The soundtrack consists of original songs combined with orchestral scores, and it’s hard not to appreciate it all.
KARMA: The Dark World cannot be called a masterpiece: the gameplay is uneven, and the metaphorical plot is interrupted quite suddenly, as if the story is not told to the end. But it is definitely a worthy psychological thriller, which keeps you in suspense until the very end and cleverly plays with emotions, so much so that you get an uncomfortable feeling of being in this monstrous dystopia.
