Ad Infinitum Review

Ad Infinitum was its most terrifying when the grotesque monsters took a backseat.

Horror games lately are laser-focused on delivering their scares through psychological roller coasters. Questioning what’s real and what is the character’s mind chipping away at feelings of guilt or regret has replaced running from deadly claws and fangs.

Part of me felt that Ad Infinitum was trudging through familiar territory, ripping pages directly out of Layers of Fear. The “haunted house” sections of the game where the world felt like it was transforming around the player’s increased knowledge reminded me of that artist’s drunken rampages and descent into madness.

For the players who absorb horror games like a sponge, Ad Infinitum may not be packed with many surprises. Jump scares were few and far between and those hulking beasts that haunt the player must be avoided rather than attacked.

But the most significant moment of abject terror came in a relatively bland moment of the game.

Paul, a young German soldier who had returned home after World War 1, was exploring the family’s massive trophy room. On either side of a crackling fireplace were the heads of animals lining the walls. As I led Paul around the room investigating papers and objects, I stumbled on a letter between Paul’s father and grandfather. His grandfather was writing home, referencing Germany’s conquest in Africa. Nearby were glass cases housing cultural artifacts from Africa, a taxidermy crocodile, and newspaper clippings. At one point, the grandfather wrote about how African natives foolishly rushed into battle with spears as German soldiers held machine guns; and that courage was stupid if it led to easy death.

“Oh yeah,” I thought. “…I forgot about that.”

My brain instantly clicked into place remembering German colonialism and its brutal, uncomfortable history. Ad Infinitum put digital reminders of the concept of German superiority throughout this room because Paul’s forebears were obsessed with the Motherland.

Representing Nazis as the closest proxy to supervillains that humanity has produced is a past time of games. Players have blown up Hitler in Bionic Commando and Wolfenstein or stopped their strange occult experiments in Call of Duty. Rarely, though, is World War I as a concept addressed, not to mention the ideology that led to one of history’s darkest times.

Ad Infinitum feels all the more disturbing because its factual implications resonate more powerfully. Developer Hekate has obviously been inspired by the stronger first-person horror games of recent years and how they explore the human psyche. Yet Ad Infinitum isn’t just a twisted and spooky amalgamation of World War I events turned into psychological monsters.

The game opens on a soldier rushing through muddy trenches, gun in hand. The sounds of fellow soldiers shouting is drowned out with bullet fire and explosions. As the music continues to swell, other humans are only seen in the periphery or far above the player in the distance. The soldier keeps pushing through the fray, splashing into puddles causing the entire screen to go temporarily dark until, eventually, they are hit by some force and thrown into a tangle of barbed wire, severing a chunk of their arm.

The player wakes in a house to the sounds of their parents fighting, groggily getting up from bed. It is implied that players are in control of Paul who was fighting on the German side in France with his brother Johannes. From there, players are driven to explore the house in an attempt to reach out to the family members that seem to be there. Paul’s mother, father, and brother appear to be specters that are just out of reach, momentarily glanced at around a corner until the game’s camera shifts away and they disappear behind a locked door or a figurative puff of smoke.

About a third of Ad Infinitum‘s eight to ten hour story takes place in this home. Players explore its sectioned-off grounds, discovering clues to the legacy of Paul’s family and peeking into his state of mind. What moment in time do events take place here? Are these interactions happening in some sort of limbo-like state or is Paul actually imagining it? This thesis provides players with an excuse to be creeped out by staged events such as a seance meant to summon back one of the children. A wax cylinder plays scratchy instructions from a psychic on how to draw a pentagram with salt as a dummy meant to represent Paul’s mother silently sits at the table.

Smartly, Hekate creates multiple threads of interest that provide possible explanations as to what is going on in the game. Implications that the spirit world is interfering because of past atrocities committed by Paul’s family is a fascinating thread that is hinted at but not overtly implied, letting the player’s paranoia do a lot of the heavy lifting.

In fact, that’s where the core “horror” becomes so powerful. In the cauldron of the player’s mind they are constantly stirring around the possibilities of what is actually going on. There’s a definite tension in wondering what actually happened during the War. We learn that Paul is the youngest brother and has the most to prove. His brother does not wish to go to war and his father at a young age contracted polio and was unable to live up to the imposing shadow his grandfather cast.

Paul’s grandfather becomes a central focus of Ad Infinitum, acting as a beacon of generational trauma and the game’s ad hoc boogeyman. The man’s legacy was so vast that it was responsible for getting Paul on the fast track to a commanding position in his battalion. It is a bloody legacy that is decorated on the walls of Paul’s ancestral home and one that torments the members of his family. When a new clue to this history is unveiled, the player will begin to mold their understanding of past events in the game’s narrative as things begin to warp the present and cause the future to become even murkier.

Strangely, I think Ad Infinitum‘s narrative strikes less true when events become overtly symbolic. Any player who has dabbled in psychological horror from any medium will see the representation in the monsters instantly. It’s probably the most “on the nose” aspect of how the developers are distorting the events haunting Paul into some nightmare representation of what happened in the war.

When not at the house, players are transported to No Man’s Land. Here we see the real world cracking to reveal a bizarre underbelly. The trenches Paul spent so much time in are infested with moving barbed wire, toothy enemies, gas clouds, and flooded caverns. A mysterious fellow soldier is encountered that directs Paul and the player to venture out of No Man’s Land to “fix” a number of problems that prevent victory in battle. Investigating a bombed out church that the German’s shelled reveals Paul’s arrogance and desire to impress as women and children may have been inside. An unknown saboteur must be stopped at a factory that makes gas Paul’s father helped design that would break through the masks of the opposition. The design of these unique environments and the monsters are fascinating in that special kind of fleshy science experiment gone wrong but the “game” aspect can’t help but get in the way.

Ad Infinitum often suffers from pacing problems spurned from its incorporation of puzzles. Few moments in the game will leave players aghast at discovering a solution. Most tasks require players to find the right order to manipulate objects or levers in. Very few of these sections divert from the obvious and only one moment had me stuck because I couldn’t figure out which specific number the game wanted me to use. The entire sequence added about 15 extra moments of frustration.

Hekate didn’t seem to know when a puzzle felt like padding rather than a way to break up stressful segments. At times, they felt like unintentional brick walls. In the gas factory, players need to divert the flow of steam at various locations to turn the power back on. While I can appreciate Ad Infinitum‘s tendency towards claustrophobic levels, here players have to use their flashlight and gas mask to navigate extremely dark portions that are often soaked in a yellow cloud. The flashlight only burns for a few seconds until its chain needs to be pulled again, causing an annoyance. Additionally, players need to adjust steam pipes and valves four separate times before this segment is over and leads to the monster encounter.

At a hospital I had to run back and forth between hallways to activate fuses to unlock a door, requiring constant backtracking. The final sequence involves activating floodlights across a maze of precarious platforms but it stretches on for far too long if you already grasp where the narrative has gone. Each of these sections ends in an encounter with the primary monster of that chapter and the player must make a binary choice of whether to save or spare the monster, influencing the game’s ending. And in the haste of trying to avoid death because these monsters can’t be killed, players may not enjoy having to awkwardly flip a switch or rotate a wheel to make a fast decision.

Had Ad Infinitum shaved off a third of these larger moments, it would have made the game significantly tighter and given more impact to its tension and scares. Keep in mind, having a good sense of what the game is narratively trying to express in that moment means that players will want to transition to the next reveal sooner rather than later. Because the game can “dwell” on a reveal with extended gameplay and a lack of real scares or tension, it dampens how digestible the true horrors become.

The final twist of the knife is simply that the game leans toward the buggier side. Visually its okay but tends to be too dark or too muddy. Environmental storytelling and sound design carry a great load in how they successful escalate that itchy feeling of things becoming rapidly uneasy.

Though as much as I loved the sound design, I think a few parts weren’t working as intended. I remember turning on a mechanical bird in the mother’s room and having its melodic chirps sounding just as close in the basement. In the final challenge area of the game, somehow I broke the sound to where only ambient noise would play properly, potentially leading to a moment where I was killed by a monster I didn’t hear the sound cues for with the death animation causing Paul to die at the wrong time. It was weird. There would also be times where I would become stuck because the game glitched my character model into a place it couldn’t escape from. Because there are sections where paths aren’t clearly signposted, this can be a pain as checkpoints may require repetition of puzzle solving.

Ad Infinitum is at its most terrifying when reflecting on the psychological and generational toll war has had on humanity. When stripping people of their grasp on reality and sense, psychological horror games often shine. But when Ad Infinitum translates the deeper consequences of colonialism and pride and its impact during World War I, I felt more terrified. Revelations don’t always have to be grotesque or induce fear to make an impression.