A very special, incredibly surreal horror game was presented.
Daniel Bódi
24.04.2024 – If 1984, Twin Peaks, BioShock and Layers of Fear are anything to go by, then you can roughly already have an idea of what kind of surreal, dark horror is in store for the latest joint psychological horror game from China’s Pollard Studio and Wired Productions, KARMA: The Dark World.
The setting is an alternate East Germany of 1984, which is being watched and controlled by a particularly megalomaniacal corporation, the Leviathan Corporation. This time, however, we are not tackling the dystopian world on the side of the oppressed, but on the side of the company: Daniel McGovern is an investigator of Leviathan’s internal thought police, who not only observes people, but is able to enter their psyches, thus gaining access to their memories and thoughts. Its purpose is to rigorously investigate the cases assigned by the company, to put together the pieces found in people’s minds, which may bring us one step closer to the truth. But whose truth is it?
Everything we think we know about reality changes in the minds of the observed people. In there, things don’t really work the way they do out there: we have to survive all kinds of hallucinations, often self-defense mechanisms, while trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together so that we can draw the line as soon as possible – so that we can then dive into another slimy brain.
A bit like being in Psychonauts with some Orwell and a bit of Layers of Fear. We are not so wrong. In Karma, everything that moves, and everything that doesn’t, paints on the screen enough surreal images for several horror exhibitions every second, as if after adding the crazy world of Hideo Kojima and Sam Lake, we have even squared it with the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.
There is no release date yet, but in addition to PC (Steam), we will be able to immerse ourselves in it on PS5 and Xbox Series.
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