Karma: The Dark World |

Publisher: Wired Productions

Developer: Pollard Studios

Release Date: 03/27/2025

Available On

I don’t know how many times I can say this. Trippy visuals aren’t indicative of an interesting or enjoyable game. They can only take a game so far before you want something else. Karma is a game that solely relies on weird and abstract visuals because it feels like the developers had an interesting story idea but had no idea how to implement it or tell the story. You play as a Thought Bureau agent who is like a cop that dives into the minds of suspects to see the truth of what they did. The first chapter of the game is pretty grounded and is the best-paced part of the whole story. You get some trippy visuals in the beginning, and then we are back to what seems like reality with narration while we walk through a pretty interesting-looking town. People have CRT TVs for heads with their faces on the screens, and it feels like an oppressive dystopian world to be in.

This is a great first impression and first chapter. It was nailed perfectly. You wake up and walk around a bit, and nothing makes sense. You are in a lab or factory, it seems, that produces people. It’s very odd, and you are supposed to be confused and unsure as to what is going on. Once you strap yourself in a chair and move on, the game starts to make no sense anymore. This is where I feel the developers didn’t know how to finish this story. There is one scene in the beginning when you are investigating an office, and this felt fine. You solve a few puzzles to find four-digit codes to open drawers to move on. The puzzles are pretty decent in this game, and I was able to figure out most of them by just deducing what I had on screen and trying logical things.

This is another game that can’t tell its overcomplicated story in just 4 short hours. Instead, we have just a walking simulator with a few puzzles and other half-baked ideas. You get a camera at one point and must use it to take pictures of eyeballs to open doors, but this feels half-baked. The areas are super tiny. One single area has you leading a creature around a specific path to get it to stop so you can take a photo of its face to kill it. This all feels half-baked, like they were neat ideas that had to be quickly shoved into a single scene. Once you get past the 5-10 minutes of gameplay, you endure the sluggish walking pace of more trippy visuals, such as flying through space, moving a cube through simulated cyberspace, walking through offices full of piles of CRTs, etc. The weird scenes are incredibly artistic and interesting, but in the end they don’t add any value to the story.

I wanted Karma to be so much better. There’s an interesting premise here. One of my favorite scenes involves one of the suspects showing us how this dystopian oppressive world works. Office workers sit and stamp things for dozens of hours and drink a company-made “energy drink” to keep them awake while propaganda plays on a giant projector in front of them. You then read an email about how all of your breaks are now taken away to “help the company growth” these types of scenes have a lot of impact, but they are so few and so brief that they left me wanting more. Many other scenes just don’t add value, such as the “hub” area of each suspect you dive into. In front of you is a giant monolith in a vast ocean, and you walk up to a podium with an important object on it, then warp to another scene. What’s the point of this area?

As you can see, Karma is an interesting game to look at, but not one to experience and especially play. The puzzles are interesting, and it leaves you wanting more when the game jerks this away from you and forces an hour of trippy visuals and story that doesn’t make any sense. Even at the end of the game I barely understood what was going on. Characters are bawling their eyes out, and there’s a lot of dialogue that feels abstract and doesn’t make sense. I was sitting there just thinking, “What the hell is happening, and why is this happening?” That’s not a good thing to think at the end of a game. Overall, play Karma if you want an interesting night of confusion and trippy visuals. It’s a shame the curious dystopian world isn’t explored more.