The brilliant Karma: The Dark World is one of the most aggressively disturbing horror games released in some time. When investigator Daniel McGovern wakes to an empty hospital room, his left arm is grossly black and bionic. After removing three tubes, he sees ebony ooze burbling out and screams, a little too emotional to be a government sleuth.
This weirdly unpopulated hospital is only the beginning. Through extremely dim, maddening office mazes, it’s discovered that McGovern’s mission is to find and interrogate Sean Mehndez, a family man addled by constant work for the autocratic Leviathan corporation. He’s also accused of robbery.
Throughout 12 hours of gameplay, Karma’s creators have taken many inspirations — including BioShock and “Severance” — to the next level with creepily surreal and bizarrely utopian set pieces. Here, the looping terror of Guillermo del Toro’s and Hideo Kojima’s P.T., a playable teaser for an unreleased horror game, is made far more frightening.
On one of McGovern’s trips through the loop of rooms, mannequins of the Mehndez family sit around a TV that shows stock footage of unsettling threshers on farmland. On the following trip, answered phones spew puzzling words. And during the next, corpses are hanging on hooks, heads rolling off their bodies if you dare approach.
Witnessing these things from a first-person point of view, I felt somewhat insane myself. I had to stop to clear my head several times, especially after visiting an office with a foreboding Christmas tree made of old computer monitors, a metaphor for Leviathan’s religious zealotry. Signs that were hung as brutal reminders read “OBEY”. Static Dobermans held obscure clues on paper.
The company’s workers, who sometimes have computer monitors as heads, are woeful, depressed and mentally drained from the steely autocracy for which they toil. They work themselves to the bone. When McGovern runs from a skeletal monster into a narrow, claustrophobic hallway with locked doors, the bony hands emitting from the goon’s chest aren’t as oppressive as the overall atmosphere. The beast is almost overkill.
The real horrors here are the effects of the company’s edicts, and the blue pills it purveys that play games with the mind but keep workers plodding through. It’s even more affecting than the excellent Mouthwashing.
Midway through, I stopped again because one of these dizzying rooms induced nausea. But I kept returning to investigate this potent mix of speculative and realist fiction, learning how democracy died, somehow feeling brainwashed as well.
