KARMA - The Dark World

Written by Eric Hauter on 3/27/2025 for PS5  

Through my years as a gaming journalist and reviewer, I’ve found that it is possible to respect a game without actually enjoying it. I look at a game like Karma: The Dark World, and I can recognize the work and planning that went into its production. I clearly see the extraordinary effort needed for the meticulous world-building, the hours and days of testing required to get the game to look as good as it does, and the training and coaching needed for the extraordinary performances that surface throughout the game. I see all of that, but I still didn’t enjoy Karma: The Dark World very much.

I read recently that one of the primary inspirations for Karma is the work of David Lynch. This might have something to do with my lack of enjoyment; some people love tinkering around with Lynch’s cinematic puzzle-boxes. I find them endlessly frustrating, because I suspect that the questions Lynch loves to pose have no real answers. He’s a provocateur, but eventually I need someone to loosen up a bit and give me a peak behind that endless curtain of metaphor. If I can’t understand what you are saying, I eventually run out of patience for your endless talking.

The good news is that Karma: The Dark World is not as deeply obscure as Lynch’s work. Sure, it is dreamlike and meandering, but there are enough familiar tropes and references here that players will eventually piece together the story. There just aren’t enough thrills or points of interest along the way to keep you engaged while you do so.

Players take on the role of Daniel McGovern, a ROAM Agent for the Leviathan Corporation. Daniel is a crime investigator, and while he does engage in traditional detective work, he also has another tool at his disposal – a machine that allows him to “dive” into the minds of suspect, mining their heads for evidence in order to piece together a chain of events. Though the mind-machine is described as a “last resort”, it seemed to me that Daniel didn’t hesitate even slightly to hurl suspects into the thing, even though it sometimes results in said suspects getting their brains melted.

I should mention that the game takes place in East Germany, in a time frame that seems to span from the mid-60’s to the mid 80’s. Along with that setting comes the expected gray and beige tones, the brutalist architecture, and the general sense of political despair (also something I’m not really in the mood for right now, due to no fault of the game makers). To that setting, you’ll want to add a thick layer of retro-futuristic Big Brother corporate malfeasance, and some very strong Franz Kafka-style unfeeling bureaucracies. Yes, the world that Daniel operates in is downright dire.

Daniel’s current case is kicked off when Sean Mehndez, a mid-tier researcher at the Winston Research Institute, is found to be breaking some of the corporation’s more mundane rules. As Daniel digs deeper into both the case and Sean’s brain, he uncovers a larger conspiracy that may have ties back to his own family and the very nature of reality.

I don’t want to say anything else about the story, other than that players should enter Karma: The Dark World wearing both their thinking caps and their patience pants (patience pants are a thing; no discussion on this point will be permitted – the Leviathan Corporation). The gameplay here is minimal, consisting mostly of opening doors, reading documents, and moving around at a speed that would imply that Daniel’s feet are sewn together. There are some puzzles to solve in order to move forward, but most of them are fairly intuitive for anyone that has played a game of this type. I only got stuck once, and looking around the environment for clues eventually freed me up.

More frustrating is Karma’s willingness to engage the player in meaningless, repetitive tasks. This is meant to illustrate the plight of the workers caught in Leviathan’s trap, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make it fun. One point in the game had me howling “How many times are you going to make me set this table?” before the game design kicked in and I noticed what I was actually supposed to be doing. I understand that stamping an endless stack of papers is boring; please don’t make me do it more than once.

I did enjoy trying to piece together the story a bit more than the gameplay itself. I really like the trippy way events are represented in suspect/victims’ heads before Daniel eventually gains clarity. Daniel can repeatedly “dive” into someone’s mind, and each time he does, things fit together a little bit better and make a bit more sense. It’s fun, for example, to see the way that Sean’s fevered mind sees a space in his memory and then see that same space the way it actually exists in the world.

Karma: The Dark World is a beautiful representation of a desperate world, and I’m afraid that making the imagery more realistic doesn’t do much to make playing the game more fun or rewarding. A little wit and a little light would have gone a long way with this one. Karma is very slow, more of an interactive novel than a game, and I’ve just spent too much time in similar worlds and narratives to be swept away by this one. It’s not empty or hollow, but it also did not engage me beyond grokking it’s many literary and cinematic references.