Karma: The Dark World is a first-person cinematic psychological thriller developed by POLLARD STUDIO LLC and co-published by Wired Productions and Gamera Games. Set in a dystopic East Germany in 1984, the Leviathan Corporation controls the country. Germany has become a surveillance state in which every person has to answer to MOTHER. Make sure to work without breaks, stay within your social class, and never question anything if you want to be a good citizen.
You wake up without memories and a body that has clearly been experimented on. After stumbling through a giant facility and walking past a pile of corpses, you meet with an older scientist. When he hears that you don’t remember anything, he seems excited; apparently, you can help everyone escape. But there isn’t time to explain before he submerges you into water, and you land in a surreal landscape. From there you can dive into your memories. And soon you’ll be able to jump into other people’s memories from there too.
You are Daniel McGovern, a Roam Agent working for the Thought Bureau. Essentially that means you’re a detective who interrogates people by linking your brain with theirs. As it turns out, diving into people’s memories used to be your job. To discover your own past, you need to experience your old cases again. And so, in classic Inception fashion, you plunge into the memories of other people while being in your memories. But it’s never that straightforward (as if anything I have explained so far has been straightforward). Memories are a strange thing, especially when filtered through a sci-fi dream machine. And eventually you also start wondering how much MOTHER might be manipulating what you’re seeing.
The cases revolve around a strange substance called Dasei. It’s a black sludge that the Leviathan Corporation is invested in, though any details about what it is seem to be unavailable. But scientists have started to perform human experiments with it, and the results are monstrous beasts that feed on humans. Plenty of body and cosmic horror commences.
If you’ve played any of the many psychological horror indie games that are so clearly inspired by P.T. (2014), then you know what to expect. Abstract imagery that suggests the interior mental state of a person. Shifting places that change every time you go through a door or interact with an object. While it pulls all the same tricks the other games in the genre also pull, what puts Karma ahead of them is that the visuals here are absolutely breathtaking. I’m not talking about the fidelity of the graphics here, though it looks fantastic too thanks to Unreal Engine 5. I’m talking about the sheer creativity on display here. A giant maze that needs to be solved from both sides at the same time to tell the story of two lovers who figure out their relationship. The same memory features a giant heart made out of two hugging figures. And while liminal office spaces aren’t anything new, I promise you haven’t seen them like in this game before.
Another aspect that puts Karma above other games like it is the performances. I’m used to some questionable voice acting from these games. If you get something serviceable, you can already consider yourself lucky. But the performances found here are just great. All of them. The voice acting is accomplished, but so is the physical acting, thanks to impressive motion capture that punches way above its weight class.
Karma wears its influences on its sleeves. The game is set in 1984, features a Thought Bureau instead of the Thought Police, and at one point literally has a puzzle built around a copy of the novel that you find. One chapter is blatantly set in the red room from Twin Peaks. And the influences from P.T. (2014), whether directly or indirectly through other games, are undeniable. And yet despite all that, the game still manages to feel so fresh and unique. There are borrowed ideas and direct references everywhere, but put together in this many, they create something entirely new.
It would be easy to write off Karma: The Dark World as just another psychological horror walking sim, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It rises above the crowd and establishes itself as one of the finest examples of the genre. If this is a genre you’re invested in, you need to play Karma: The Dark World. And if you’re not, then the sci-fi dystopia and outstanding imagery might still pull you in.
Nairon played Karma: The Dark World on PC with a provided review copy.
