3.5/5 ★ – jake84's review of KARMA: The Dark World.

KARMA: The Dark World is a dystopian, surreal, first-person psychological horror game spliced with "narrative exploration" elements, or "walking sim", if you will. It takes about five hours to complete. I like this game a lot, even despite all its shortcomings. And sadly, there are quite a few. Let's get them out of the way first: For instance, the game's standard language setting is Chinese, even when sold in Europe, and yes, even the menus. It took me some time to brute force the menus to turn it into English. Also, the brightness is soooo dim. Even when turned to maximum. I spent nine whole minutes trying to find out where I was going in a completely ink-black air vent (don't worry, there are just two of those), because there was absolutely NOTHING I could see, and the level design didn't telegraph that there was a side vent - absolutely no light coming from it or anything to make itself noticable. It makes no sense that you get a flashlight for two minutes and then it disappears. I'll say the length is also about an hour or so too long, because towards the end the world building just comes crashing onto you alongside a huge lore dump, and it made my brain swift off due to the excessive amounts of info. Worse than this, the English voice acting goes SOOOOO overboard at times it's unbearable. It's not a performance choice, it's the writing and directing. It's just too much, especially towards the end with all the shouting, shrieking, whining and wailing. And sadly, that's precisely where it should be making the biggest impact and not be off-putting; it falls short a few feet from its mark. The way the story is told leans a little too heavily into the purposefully weird, but that's a matter of taste and perspective. I will say that some of the satire and comments of modern day capitalism and bureaucracy and cooperate greed were too heavy-handed to miss, but on the other hand, I don't see this as a detriment, since sometimes these psychological horror titles can get so vague that I didn't leave at all with the intended message. But holy hell, the aesthetics of this game! The look of KARMA: The Dark World is surprisingly high standard with some impressive facial animations and designs. It's made in Unreal Engine, but not the usual, plastic look you can get with this framework. There are certain moments where I couldn't tell if it was real-life footage or the in-game graphics. THAT's how far we've come with graphics in an indie horror title. I do, however, sense a little bit of AI work in some in-game sketches, but I hope that's just me seeing ghosts. This game has atmosphere in spades; the mixture of Lynchian oddness and some Cronanbergian designs. Yes, all the Davids are present! You also get a psychological horror theme and some characters that resemble Silent Hill. And the puzzles are mainly on par with the difficulty level present in Resident Evil. That being said, it's not a game where you fight monsters. At least, not in the survival horror sense, there are just a few hide and seek sequences and some photography sequences that references Fatal Frame, but there are none of the dreaded, obtuse stealth horror scenes that most of these narrative exploration horror games always use. All in all, I think KARMA is the good version of Observer (a game that wasted a lot more potential). But can we talk about how there are characters in this game named Shawn Mendes and Rachel Weisz? Can't figure out if it's a coincidence or some weird in-joke from the game designers.