Karma: The Dark World
Rating: 10 out of 10
Note: Review is based on the PlayStation 5 version.
There is a schism in horror gaming at the moment, particularly outside the big franchises like Dead Space, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill. On one hand, games can use low fidelity, pixel art, or fifth generation polygons to evoke a murky sense of gritty terror akin to the old days of scanlines and VHS rentals. Earlier this year, we looked at Urban Myth Dissolution Center, an apex example of this approach that expertly uses its dated graphical style and relatively simplicity to tip the scares into the uncanny valley.
These are great, but the evolution of gorgeous horror is also remarkable. Games like Still Wakes the Deep, The Quarry, and even The Last of Us Part 2 go out of their way to add moments of artistic beauty amid the grotesqueries, which generates this playful battle of tastes that makes the gore sweeter by contrasting it.
I’m not sure that style has ever been done better than Karma: The Dark World. Developed by Chinese studio Pollard and published by British company Wired, it’s a complete mind-bending experience that makes Soma seem grounded by comparison.Every minute is something twisted, whether it’s body horror or lush dreamscapes.
The game follows Daniel, a roaming thought crime agent for a city state ruled by an iron fist by the Leviathan Corporation. Heavily inspired by George Orwell’s novel 1984, Daniel must dive into the memories of several Leviathan employees to unravel a set of mysteries.
As you’d expect from a game that is centered around mind control and memory invasion, Karma indulges in a lot of surrealism and sanity-testing tricks. A whole section in the early game is lifted right from the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, which is the original mental metaverse dimension. One thing you can say for Karma is that it has no problem wearing its inspirations on its sleeve. I even found a Tardis cameo.
This approach solves a couple of problems for a small studio looking to be as pretty as it can be. One, you can wave away a lot of detail by making it a quavering nightmare. The background cast is mostly represented by identical men in suits with televisions for heads. Faces of other NPCs are intentionally warped and blurred as they sometimes would be in a dream. It’s disorientating, but I’m sure extremely cost effective when you want to avoid photorealism.
Two, the dreamspace adds so many odd quirks to the sense of movement. Daniel is a young healthy man, able to briskly jog and escape the rare monsters that chase you. When he’s in the head of another character, though, the player’s speed is badly reduced to accomodate for a prosthetic leg. In another sequence, the player’s movement speeds up randomly as you maneuver puzzles. Since this is all in first person, it creates this weird, queasy sense of inconsistent motion that makes the terror harder to stomach. Lots of games make you feel helpless, but Karma won’t even allow your walking speed to be reliable. It’s a cheap, but effective trick.
Luckily, the game is paced well to avoid these mechanics becoming frustrating. Most of the time, Karma gets by on an incredible sense of dread (bolstered considerably by Geng Li’s brilliant score). There are only a handful of sections that require you to run from or fight a monster, and the average player shouldn’t need more than a couple of tries to get past them. A survival horror game depends on enemy encounters being just challenging enough to scare you with a couple of kills but not so challenging that repeated failure robs the encounters of their impact. Karma achieves this balance perfectly.
That leaves puzzles. These are mid-level challenging. I only had to turn to Reddit once to solve one, and that was because a glitch had made an item impossible to interact with. Even with crazy dream logic behind half of the puzzles, they never felt like a road block.
One fun mechanic is a set of puzzle boxes scattered around the world. They contain the game’s collectibles, little action figures based on real world scientists, pop culture icons (Agent Dale Cooper is found in the Black Lodge section), and in-world characters. Each one involves a pictogram logic puzzle that will be familiar to anyone that has ever taken an IQ test. These can be quite hard, and you only get one shot unless you save scum. They feel sort of like Resident Evil‘s save rooms, brief moments of mildness and normalcy before you return to the darkness. It’s a clever way to add some minigame content and round out the trophy hunt.
The story is dark. Very dark. It covers everything from slavery to forced prostitution of a child to war. There’s this nauseating sequence where you control a worker stamping papers as a company recording extols the virtue of never having a holiday. The character sobs inconsolably as he shotguns energy drinks to move past the hopelessness and the exhaustion.
It’s moments like these that make Karma something special. Anti-capitalist game themes are nothing new in an industry where long work hours and brutal conditions are sadly the norm, but Karma turns that criticism up until the knob breaks off. Lots of us will see ourselves in the game, trapped by oppressive, all-powerful forces that make endless demands on our lives and expect us to thank them for it.
Thank God the game is only around ten hours long. Any more and it would be too much. The experience of playing is like peeling back the mask of every parasitic boss in the world to see the leeches underneath. That makes a compelling story, but it’s definitely not a comfortable experience.
Karma: The Dark World is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC. $24.99
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
