Karma The Dark World review - a sci-fi horror bogged down by references

Karma: The Dark World doesn’t do much to hide its inspirations. Within the game’s first hour, you will find overt nods to everything from Twin Peaks and 1984 to Blade Runner and Inception. This, in and of itself, isn’t a problem; plenty of great work is created from acknowledging its influences. Unfortunately, Karma is a game that never quite manages to find an identity beyond the stories and iconography it pulls from – and, when it tries to overcome this issue, its most ambitious and original ideas end up bewilderingly mishandled.

You enter horror game: a man waking up in a hospital bed in the year 1984, unable to recall how he got there. Before long, he drags himself through halogen-lit corridors, rooms filled with piles of dirt-covered corpses, and is then strapped to a chair that transports him to an otherworldly location by plunging him backward into a pool of black goop.

Something like the main plot kicks off from here, jumping back in time to an alt-history 1976. From this point on, Karma’s overarching character perspective belongs to a ‘Roam Agent’ – an East German detective called Daniel McGovern. Daniel works for the Orwellian ‘Thought Bureau’ of a fictional megacorporation called Leviathan, which rules society through the all-seeing eye of an artificial intelligence called Mother (the 1984 references extend even further to a Leviathan division called The Winston Institute). While the population under Leviathan’s control is subject to constant surveillance, public executions by agents with boxy televisions for heads, and kept docile through state-sponsored amphetamine drinks and draconian social credit systems, Roam Agents like Daniel solve crimes by plopping on headsets and exploring suspects’ memories.

Delving into these mental landscapes occupies most of Karma’s runtime, and the game finds its best moments in the play between reality and fantasy that this conceit affords. Once Daniel’s inside a character’s mind, you’ll explore levels that slip back and forth between the mundane and surreal. There are a few simple puzzles to solve along the way, ranging from punching in codes based on nearby clues to open locked doors or searching the environment for hidden features, sometimes revealed by peering through the lens of a camera. A few sequences involve running away or sneaking past a multi-limbed monster or snapping a photo at just the right time to avoid getting grabbed up and immediately killed.

Largely, though, Karma is about taking in the sights and sounds that tell its story. It makes a poor first impression by relying far too heavily on borrowed imagery and plot points from other, well-known films, TV shows, and videogames. One of the first set of memories Daniel explores features a recurring tableau where a family apartment is rendered with the same black and white floor pattern and crimson drapes as Twin Peaks’ Red Room; Leviathan’s corporate architecture and art deco logos are swiped from the John Hurt-starring 1984 film adaptation; the sci-fi noir atmosphere and brain-diving share more than a few similarities with Blade Runner and Inception. There’s other, much more original imagery to encounter as well, though. An early scene is set in a sort of watery void whose horizon is dominated by a skyscraper-sized white slab and two massive statues of prone bodies, their fingers sticking up like redwood trunks from collapsed hands. Other segments take place in areas like an apartment that’s entirely covered in cardboard until a camera is lifted up to reveal grungy furniture, or a series of winding hallways festooned with unblinking eyeballs and flickering television screens.

At times, Karma possesses a dense, eerie atmosphere, especially in investigation scenes where rain patters against the windows of empty, late-night offices to combine with music and announcements drifting in from other rooms. The soundtrack is excellent, filled with moaning strings and morose piano notes, haunting church choirs and pounding drums. Confident interplay between sound and image leads to a number of truly gorgeous moments, like a sequence where a budding relationship between two citizens of Karma’s dystopian city fumble toward the beginning of a romance, frightened to impose any level of control onto each other and make their already stifled lives in Karma’s totalitarian world more difficult. The game’s dreamlike construction allows their story to be told in abstract. You control twin balls of light that move toward each other through a labyrinth, the soundtrack swelling beautifully when the pair eventually meet and transform into intertwining ribbons flying above an ocean.

In scenes like this, Karma seems smarter than its blunt referentiality makes it appear. There’s a level of subtlety at times in how it looks at authoritarianism not just as overt government control but as a process, too, by which friends and families might attempt to control each other, willingly or accidentally, for their own material or emotional needs. But, as the game heads into its ending, it throws away all restraint for a sequence of confounding plot points revealed in a disorienting torrent of new information.

Karma’s script is fairly clunky, dotted with awkward turns of phrase and unwieldy grammatical constructions. This is a manageable issue until the ending. Once the final act kicks off, a sense of concern creeps in that maybe the story’s mysteries wouldn’t be quite as opaque – or its sudden resolution quite as confounding – if the characters and ideas up to that point had been presented with clearer dialogue and plot construction. As it is, the conclusion throws away much of what works in the rest of the game, introducing thorny new concepts and surprising plot revelations that require more time than they’re given to adequately unpack.

This dismal conclusion stops Karma from making good on the moments when it comes closest to establishing an identity of its own. Because it never manages to find that sense of personality, it remains a game defined in large part by the media it references. These comparisons put it at a disadvantage because, when the audience is invited to compare Karma’s exploration of authoritarianism to 1984, or the emotional power of its storytelling to that of Twin Peaks, the result isn’t flattering. If Karma was more willing to trust in its creators’ own vision and focus on telling a story that didn’t overreach in its last act, it would be a much better game.