Karma: The Dark World uses so much classic science fantasy and horror that it struggles to create its own unique identity.
You enter the science-fiction world of Karma, but you do so in the wrong way on purpose. It is story begins in a first-person perspective, one of the many perspectives you'll encounter in this horror game: a man who wakes up in a hospital bed in 1984, and has no memory of how he got there. Shortly after, he finds himself dragged through halogen-lit corridors, rooms filled with piles of filth-covered bodies, and then tied to a chair that throws him backwards into a pool of black glue and into another world.
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The main plot starts here taking us back in time to an alternate version of 1976. From this point on, Karma's overarching character perspective belongs to a 'ROM agent an East German spy named Daniel McGovern. Daniel works for the Orwellian 'Thought Bureau' of a fictional megacorporation called Leviathan, which rules society through the omnipresent vision of an artificial intelligence called Mother (references to 1984 carry over to a Leviathan division called The Winston Institute). While the population under Leviathan's control is kept under control through constant surveillance, public assassinations by agents with TV boxes in place of heads, state-sponsored amphetamine drinks and sinister social credit systems, Rom agents like Daniel solve crimes by wearing headsets and searching the memories of suspects.
Much of Karma's time is spent immersing yourself in these mental scenes, and the game finds its best moments in the play between reality and fantasy that this conceit provides. Once Daniel enters a character's mind you will explore levels that go back and forth between mundanity and reality. There are a few simple puzzles to solve along the way, like entering pass codes based on nearby clues, opening locked doors or discovering hidden features in the environment which are sometimes revealed when peering through the camera lens. Some scenes involve running or hiding from a multi-armed monster or taking a photo at just the right time to avoid being caught and instantly killed.
By and large, however, Karma relies on observing the sights and sounds that tell its story. It makes a poor impression at first glance by relying too heavily on imagery and plotlines borrowed from other more popular films TV shows, and video games. One of the first memories Daniel explores shows a family’s apartment with a black-and-white floor pattern and red curtains. similar to the Red Room from Twin Peaks; Leviathan's corporate architecture and Art Deco logo are lifted from the 1984 film adaptation starring John Hurt; the science-fiction noir atmosphere and mind-dive have many similarities with Blade Runner and Inception. However, there's also much more surreal imagery to consider. The opening scene is set in a sort of aquatic void, with a skyscraper-sized white slab in view and two giant statues whose fingers look like redwood twigs protruding from collapsed hands. Other scenes happen in places like an apartment filled with cardboard showing dirty furniture until the camera lifts or in hallways with blinking eyes and flickering TV screens.
At times, Karma has a thick, creepy atmosphere, particularly in the investigation scenes, where raindrops pelt the windows of empty offices left open late at night and music and announcements coming from other rooms are interspersed. The soundtrack is superb, full of mourning strings and sad piano notes ghostly church choirs and pounding drums. The impressive interplay between sound and image leads to several truly spectacular moments, such as a scene in which a budding relationship between two citizens of the terrifying town of Karma leans toward the beginnings of a romance, who are afraid to impose any level of control on each other and make their already oppressive lives in the authoritarian world of Karma even more difficult. The game's dreamlike structure allows it to tell its story in a concise manner. You control two balls of light that move towards each other through a maze, and when the two eventually meet and transform into interconnected ribbons flying over the ocean the soundtrack swells beautifully.
In scenes like this, Karma seems far more clever than its obvious context would suggest. At times there is a level of subtlety that looks at totalitarianism not just as government control, but as a process by which friends and family attempt to control each other, willingly or accidentally, for their own physical or emotional needs. But, as the game moves towards its end, it abandons all restraint, unleashing a series of confusing plot points in a distracting flow of new information.
Karma's screenplay is quite complex, filled with awkward phrasing and unnecessary grammatical structures. It's a manageable issue by the end. As the final scene begins, a sense of worry emerges that if the characters and ideas up until that point had been presented with clear dialogue and plot structure, perhaps the story's mysteries wouldn't have been so unclear or its abrupt resolutions so confusing. The conclusion weakens much of the work done earlier in the game and adds new complex ideas and plot twists that take too long to explain properly.
This disappointing conclusion prevents Karma from doing well in the moments when it comes closest to establishing its own identity. It never finds its own unique style so it just feels like another game it takes ideas from. These comparisons hurt the game because when viewers compare Karma's quest for power to 1984 or it is a storytelling to Twin Peaks it does not measure up. If Karma had trusted its creators vision and focused on a story that stayed more consistent toward the end it would have been a much better game.
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