Karma: The Dark World Review

Karma: The Dark World is one of the most thoughtfully directed games I’ve ever played. Numerous shots feel choreographed in a way to maximize their emotional or surreal impact. It made me think of the whirlwind spectacle that was Indika‘s constant push to recalibrate the player’s attention and the meaning of a particular narrative beat.

My first glimpse at Karma was rife with stunning, evocative imagery. It was a trailer that could have been approved by Hideo Kojima, a collection of snippets ripped from the game without context flashing in front of the viewer as a song dramatically played.

Throughout my time with the game, a striking number of homages unfold. David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, DC Comics, Bioshock, to name a few. While moments can feel almost copied from another source, the intent is never a kind of forgery. The small Chinese team at Pollard Studio has an undeniably promising future if they can produce a bizarre fever dream like Karma out of the gate.

But I want to do something I don’t often recommend: avoid any trailer for Karma. After completing the game and trying to find that specific trailer I viewed for a reference, I noticed that every single trailer for the game spoiled a particularly poignant sequence or narrative reveal from this eight to ten hour experience. Blame marketing, I suppose. But to have Karma‘s most strange, surreal, and haunting segments stripped of their surprise would be a disservice to the carefully crafted roller coaster Pollard built.

As with any journey into the psyche, Karma is a road trip through symbolism and imagery both subtle and blatant in its meaning.

Set in Eastern Europe–more specifically Germany and dabbling with the USSR–and taking place through the 1960s all the way to 1984, Karma never lets go of its Orwellian grip. Players may forget that the game imagines a post-World War II, pseudo-Cold War alternate history, I certainly did. Pollard blurs the lines of factual setting, obscuring a definitive sense of place through the use of strange technology and an unreliable narrator.

Karma is primarily told through the eyes of Daniel McGovern, a ROAM Agent for the monolithic Leviathan Corporation. Enticing monikers like “The Thought Bureau” and an omniscient overseer referred to as “Mother” amplify the notion that players are walking the streets of a police state.

But the game begins with a disorienting scene, immediately meant to fracture the concept of what is actually going on or about to happen in the narrative. A patient wakes up from a hospital bed, ripping a strange device off their arm, black fluid rushing out. A look in the mirror reveals a fragile, pallid man with skin almost grey. He looks out the window and objects are glitching in and out of existence.

Shortly after the game’s opening, I couldn’t place if I was about to delve into an unsettling piece of horror or a dystopian science fiction thriller. And it’s that juggling act that keeps Karma‘s world densely interesting, even if players don’t get too immersive a glimpse into it.

Daniel is being sent to investigate suspicious activity conducted by Sean Mehndez, one of Leviathan’s countless employees. Sean was seen on camera too close to restricted company equipment and has possibly stolen company property.

Of course, what begins as a routine investigation is anything but. Further into the game, Daniel seeks to interrogate Sean. But rather than in a smoke-filled police room, Daniel’s job as a ROAM agent means he will explore the memories tucked away inside Sean’s head using a a special headset powered by unknown technology.

Dalliances into the exploratory territory of the mind usually make for interesting fiction. Countless stories have relied on the notion of dreams, memories, thoughts, and how they coherently and incoherently can craft mind-altering truths that never happened but feel real. Daniel’s job is to explore Sean’s mind, poking around the corners of his grey matter, potentially to see if his ramblings about a “monster that took his leg” have any basis in truth and fact.

And let’s just get this out of the way. As a game, a video game that is an interactive work, Karma offers the sum total of what players may expect from a “walking simulator”, at least mechanically.

Much of the player’s time is going to be spent traversing spaces and the places in between destinations. Infrequently there will be notes to collect that offer insight into the universe’s wider lore, puzzles, and small interactive bits. Generously, Pollard Studio’s implementation of a “run” button isn’t abhorrent. Yes, it could be faster in a few instances but I found it suitable for the size of the walkable areas.

For the tucked away memos and collectibles, they were relatively insightful but nothing profound. My primary complaint was that when the player goes to read a memo, Pollard chose white text to be displayed, often over a white page. After several times, I learned to rotate the book or letter I was holding to be as thin as possible, so the projected text was legible. An easy fix would have been to significantly darken the screen when reading a note.

Along the way, small optional puzzle boxes can be opened that usually rely on a kind of cypher or environmental clue to solve. But failing to unlock it the first time locks the player out entirely, requiring a chapter load. But these elements are primarily for trophy hounds anyway.

Puzzles that actually inhibit progression were relatively standard, nothing that a thorough player wouldn’t be able to figure out. Despite faint roots in adventure games, Karma has little reliance on an inventory. A tube of lipstick found in an earlier room is used to solve a password and if the player is paying enough attention, the dots are easily connected. It isn’t that Pollard is hand-holding. Honestly, I think developers feel compelled to throw these blockades at the player not to pad out runtime but to reward their hankering for traditional “game” experiences.

With that in mind, reflecting back on Karma presenting its challenges in front of my constant path forward, there were a few times where I felt that the content was somewhat repetitive. A number of times, Daniel is working through a memory and repeated near-similar actions in the same space with just a few alterations to the visuals or pattern. Players after the second time may reach a point where they “get it”, along with the message Pollard is trying to impress, only to need to do the thing again before they can progress.

In that way, it felt as though I wasn’t being challenged, merely hindered from getting to the next narrative beat. And that same complaint goes along with the handful of chase sequences where the player is being pursued by a monster or other entity. These are the moments where the player is required to merely get away. Failure results in being placed back usually at the beginning of the sequence, which may be a checkpoint annoyance to some. I even recall a moment meant to alleviate stress after one of the first chases, with Daniel, as Sean, crawling through a ventilation shaft after a tense escape. That crawl felt surprisingly long, extended more than it needed to be.

When I reflect on Pollard’s use of pacing in Karma, I’m left slightly frustrated. In the moment, while playing the game, I don’t think it truly irked me. But looking back, it does cloud the experience. Perhaps like the game’s characters felt, memory truly isn’t all that reliable at times.

Regardless of my annoyance during or after my time with Karma, I’m truly left with the vivid imagery produced by Pollard.

Milquetoast gameplay can lessen the overall impact of the strongest narrative-driven games, and Karma is no exception. Yet the abstract and bizarre visions the game produced on my screen will resonate with me for awhile. More so, the risks taken by the studio speak to a voice that will only grow stronger with time.

Like any game, before players begin they can adjust their settings, from audio to controller layout. Karma cleverly masks the most important elements–like field of view–behind a small interactive segment delivered like an actual calibration of the player character. It’s a trick few games have employed and it works exceptionally here.

Those kinds of elements feel less like stunts and more like a director, script writer, and cinematographer working in harmony to produce a piece of art.

Harm would be done if I made an attempt to describe the moments that lingered most for me. But I truly believe that the way the narrative work and deployment of visual segments are a testament to the power of development studios who take pride in experimentation. Karma is packed with bold moments that may not be entirely profound in the context of the the narrative, but are framed in such a striking way that they are seared into the mind.

Walking around a world where passerby have televisions replacing their heads is absolutely ridiculous but it works. Karma has a klaxon that blares “SYMBOLISM” frequently and while it may be on the nose, that often produces the more stunning visual feast. I do feel as if Pollard had a massive world in mind containing past events that could be further explored. And it’s a shame that I wanted a bit more from the narrative because when it’s all wrapped up, there was a sense of missing elements. The final act of the game was truly bizarre, leaving me with a feeling that I knew what was being told to me. And I had an itch to go right back, perhaps to clean up the burning questions in my brain.

Karma: The Dark World is a rare game that offers stark familiarity but challenges the concept of normalization. Its mechanical trappings keep it grounded and mildly rote. But it is horror with minimal jump scares. Techno-thriller via existential dreams. Disparate elements made tenuously coherent. Beyond any critique, however, Pollard Studio, with their debut, have made a game with truly stunning visual direction that only the most seasoned directors have achieved.