Karma: The Dark World final preview – A delightfully creepy experience I need more of

While crawling through a narrow vent towards a wrecked office bathed in a violent red light, I realised I hadn’t once questioned the bizarre events unfolding around me in Karma: The Dark World. I had seen people with televisions for heads, scratched warnings scrawled on walls, and ghoulish apparitions haunting those who ignored them. In this alternative world where a totalitarian and omnipresent corporation wields control, the unsettling blend of the bizarre and horrifying is as chilling as it is captivating.

When I last previewed Karma: The Dark World, I arranged corpses into piles, stamped files while consuming mind-altering and performance-enhancing drugs, jumped into someone’s mind to experience their memories, and was chased by a quadruple-armed monster through moving and rotating hallways in said memory. It was tense, engaging, and I needed more.

Karma embraces the weird and the frightening, and that was one of the many reasons I was eager to jump back into the game for a short, final preview. While my most recent time with the game wasn’t as terrifying as my last, it was filled with a different type of horror, one that focuses on overwhelming you with dread and tension – my favourite kind.

For this final preview, my time with Karma began immediately after the game’s prologue, placing me into the shoes of Daniel McGovern, a Roam Agent for the Leviathan Corporation’s Thought Bureau, a branch of the corporation dedicated to handling criminal cases. I was tasked with investigating a theft at the Winston Research Institute – another branch of the corporation – and an “unusual incident” at a clerical office, all involving employee Sean Mehndez.

An abnormal investigation

The investigation itself began ordinarily enough. I explored a normal reception office and a mail room, uncovering important documents that offered additional lore into the world and the goings on at the Research Institute, before heading upstairs and navigating tight corridors with looming shadows – at one point a conveniently placed coat stand and hat left me frozen in fear thinking someone ready to jump me.

My search eventually required me to enter a locked storage room, which needed a keycard hidden in a password-locked drawer. A nearby diary offered a hint as to how to uncover the password, and I pieced it together by using snapshots from one of the many Leviathan Corporation’s Telescreens, which are used to monitor the Institute’s employees. The demo was filled with other small puzzles like this: I used markings on a lipstick container to uncover a second password and deciphered a code to uncover a third that gave me a key for a fuse that switched on the power to rooms in the building.

Between these puzzles, Pollard Studio excelled at creating an atmosphere that felt deeply wrong. The Institute’s suffocating design, paired with the game’s first-person perspective, immersed me completely. Subtle touches – like manually pulling open doors or interacting with objects – forced me to live Daniel’s dread as we traversed dark corridors, watched rain lash against windows, and briefly had our surroundings illuminated by flashes of lightning.

Meanwhile, the technology, for an alternative 1976 setting, felt both redundant and ahead of its time, which helped cement that I was in a strange world where everything felt familiar, but just not quite right. Old-fashioned static radios sat on desks that featured password-locked drawers, and giant telescreens with eyes watched over these desks as a constant reminder of the all-seeing Leviathan Corporation.

All of these were contributing factors that made me feel uneasy about the situation and what I was investigating, which worsened once I recovered the Leviathan Corporation’s stolen item.

Unusual goings on

After breaking into the storage room, I discovered a ventilation shaft. I crawled through it, with Daniel painfully groaning in my ear, before emerging into a clerical office. A collapsed bookcase blocked the door back to the earlier corridor, which I lifted by holding the DualSense’s triangle button. The office itself had been completely upturned (Check my last preview to find out why), and after some brief puzzle-solving to acquire a fuse, my investigation led me to Mehndez’s desk.

After unlocking his desk drawer, I retrieved the item he had stolen from the Leviathan Corporation. Before I could act on it, the nearby telescreen sprang to life and I was instantly confronted by MOTHER – the Corporation’s all-seeing eye – to return it. As I made my way to leave the room, a zombified Mehndez stalked across the screen.

Curious, I followed.

The zombie Mehndez led me back through the corridors I had explored earlier towards a previously locked door that now stood ajar. Behind it was a black room with only a single door. I stepped through it and emerged into a red-curtained recreation of Mehndez’s living room, with what looked like puppet versions of the family of three – Sean, his wife, and their daughter Grace – eating at a dining table.

I followed the only hallway down to a cabinet with a diary entry by Grace expressing her desire to be a scientist like her dad. I peered into her room, although it was blocked by a fallen chair, and then returned to the living room. The puppet family had moved and were now watching television; clips of red lights, country roads, mountain rivers, and more. When I approached the television, it snapped off and the family moved again, this time to a new hallway leading to an elevator. I followed, entered the elevator, and as the doors slid shut, my time with the game came to an end.

Though brief, the demo for Karma: The Dark World left me eager for more, with its mysteries – and horrors – only just beginning to unfold. I can’t wait to see what we uncover about the corporation, and I’ll impatiently wait to jump back in when the game launches later this year.