Fans of psychological horror are in for a paranoia-inducing treat this year. Karma: The Dark World seems to be a gripping, deeply unsettling first-person cinematic horror game set to release for PC sometime in 2025. I played a demo of the game that lasted about three hours, and found the gameplay to be refreshingly dread-inducing.
Set in an alternate version of East Germany in 1984, Karma: The Dark world combines Orwellian dystopia with some of the best bits of popular psychological thrillers. The game sees players step into the shoes of one Daniel McGovern, a Roam Agent working for the Leviathan Organization–specifically the company’s Thought Bureau. The Leviathan Organization appears to have effectively replaced the government of the entire Soviet Union.
It immediately becomes clear that regardless of which branch one works for, Leviathan fosters a paranoid, hostile, extremely strange work environment. For example, when visiting the Thought Bureau offices, players will notice that Daniel’s colleagues all have television sets in place of a head, with their face appearing on the screen. Although Daniel’s own organic skull seems to be intact, he also has no reaction whatsoever to encountering his TV-headed coworkers. There are lots of odd little details like this, many pointing to this version of East Germany’s recent progress in tech development. Leviathan itself is run by Mother: an artificial intelligence built by Soviet scientists for the purpose of enforcing social order. Given the public executions Daniel stumbles across early on in the game, the whole social order thing seems like it might not be going so well.
Daniel works as a sort of mental detective, intervening when a serious thought crime has been committed, assessing the situation, and collecting evidence to hand over to Mother. He’s currently in the process of tracking down a suspect, Sean Mendhez. Sean has committed some sort of crime, and though the details are blurry, one thing is clear: Mother wants answers.
Daniel collects evidence via a rather unorthodox method: braindives. Braindives are effectively Cyberpunk 2077’s braindance tech, with the only real difference being that Thought Bureau agents can dive into a living subject’s consciousness to parse through their memories rather than reviewing a recording of one. Braindives aren’t without risk, however–subjects can drop dead during the interrogation, though it seems that Leviathan generally tries to keep the mortality rate low, and Daniel has an excellent track record when it comes to successfully performing braindives without accidentally offing his subjects.
It eventually becomes clear that Sean also works for Leviathan, though not the Thought Bureau division. Instead, he’s involved with The Winston Institute, which is effectively Leviathan’s version of DARPA. Upon investigating the institute, it becomes immediately clear that whatever crime Sean committed has wrought havoc on both the Institute and Leviathan itself. Sean’s office–which he shared with several other coworkers–has been completely torn apart, and other parts of the Winston Institute also appear to have been damaged recently. Large file cabinets and desks have been knocked over and pushed together, creating a maze of office furniture. The incident clearly happened recently, but it’s hard to imagine Sean managing this level of destruction. Sean is a thin, soft-spoken man who recently experienced a devastating on-the-job injury, so it’s difficult to picture him flinging around file cabinets.
The game has a strange, delightfully Lynchian atmosphere. A room representing Sean’s home has an almost identical design to Twin Peaks’ red room, where it’s revealed that Sean was recently demoted due to his injury, his bills are piling up, and his relationship with his wife and young daughter have suffered as a result. But things really take a turn into fever-dream territory when Daniel goes for a braindive in Sean’s consciousness. It appears that Sean has stolen some sort of sample from The Winston Institute, but it’s unclear what exactly it is, or how it led to this level of chaos.
Karma–which has thus far been immensely unsettling and intriguing, though not quite scream-worthy–reveals its true, horrific nature as Sean’s memories unfold. A grotesque, multi-limbed creature is stalking the halls of The Winston Institute, and Karma’s excellent pacing makes its reveal even scarier. Karma doesn’t overuse jumpscares, so when they do trigger, they’re much more effective. (I flung a controller halfway across the room when a small mannequin made an unexpected appearance.) So far, the narrative is thought-provoking enough to hold one’s attention without having something pop out and go “Boo!” every few moments. These early moments in Karma do a masterful job of lowering the player’s guard just enough to scare the everloving hell out of them when it wants to, without being too boring, too obvious, or too generous with jumpscares.
The primary issue the game runs into is the main character being way too slow. The world of Karma is rich and fascinating, and the hours I played were littered with satisfying puzzles. (A few of them do feel like they operate on moon logic, but for the most part, Karma’s puzzles can be solved without the compulsion to look up a guide.) But the default walking speed is painfully slow, which makes exploring a space or backtracking in a large area while searching for a puzzle solution quite irritating. Things only get worse when you need to run.
The introduction of sprinting causes Karma’s otherwise excellent pacing to hit a speed bump. In the moment, you get a glimpse of a monstrous pursuer that appears to be moving alarmingly fast. It’s a tense moment that feels like it should lead into a frantic chase, but it’s hard not to giggle when you hit the sprint button and Daniel just casually moseys his way down the hall at a speed that’s only the tiniest bit faster than his default snail-covered-in-molasses walking pace. Running through Karma’s mind-bending environment feels like a leisurely stroll, and the end result is annoying (but admittedly amusing), which undercuts all the buildup of fear and tension up to that point.
Navigation is another area where Karma stumbles. In what I played, players will largely be piloting Daniel in a linear path, or exploring a series of rooms while ultimately moving forward. There do seem to be moments where that’s not the case, but the game doesn’t do a great job advertising them. At one point, while I was playing, I came across a dead end. Conveniently, a map on a nearby wall gave a detailed layout of the immediate area. Looking at the map prompted Daniel to point out that he can take a shortcut through the ventilation system, and directly next to this map is a vent, implying that this is likely the way forward. But it can’t be opened. After a significant amount of sprint-crawling back and forth between the map and other parts of the area, I discovered a different, larger vent that I could access. It was a confusing bit of gameplay, disrupting the pacing of the story and once again dampening the building tension necessary to maintain the feeling of fear. Not every area of the game has a map, nor does every area need one, but the placement of and context in which players do encounter Karma’s maps can make for a few instances of irritation, especially given the slow movement speed.
But aside from the bizarrely slow running mechanic and map-related confusion, it’s hard to complain about the rest of Karma. The game’s environments are striking, strange, and at times, beautiful. Though what I played was very much an on-rails experience, the world felt alive, and that life feels like it extends beyond what’s directly in front of the player’s face. Most NPCs can’t be interacted with, but there are plenty of them around, and they’re all getting up to interesting hijinks that players can learn about when they get within eavesdropping range. The narrative is thus far well-written, intriguing, and full of good twists and turns that will take players by surprise without feeling as though they came out of nowhere. I think players who enjoy piecing together the big picture by searching for narrative breadcrumbs will be well-fed.
By far, Karma’s best features are its ambiance and its story. The unnerving, backrooms-esque liminal spaces in which the game is set are highly detailed, and its art style is well-developed. The sound design is excellent and doesn’t overuse loud stings in the hopes of eliciting yet another jumpscare. It feels like the game’s vision is laid out with confidence–Karma doesn’t over-explain itself, yet also doesn’t use its dreamlike tone to obscure answers to questions the writers should have thought of, but didn’t.
Fans of Control, Soma, and We Happy Few will be right at home with Karma: The Dark World. Karma takes blatant inspiration from a number of well-loved games, films, and TV shows, including Alien, Blade Runner, Severance, and Twin Peaks, but doesn’t feel like a rip-off. In a sea of first-person psychological thrillers that recycle overplayed references to other works of horror, Karma: The Dark World deftly assembles its sources of inspiration into something that feels new, cohesive, intriguing, and most importantly, genuinely chilling.