Karma: The Dark World Understands That Horror Lives in Your Head

ign.com:

Stephen King once famously wrote that there were three levels of terror: the gross-out, when blood and guts are everywhere; horror, as King put it, “the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead up and walking around, it’s when something with claws grabs you by the arms”; and terror: “when the lights go out and when you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against you, and you turn around, there’s nothing there.” King believed terror was the finest emotion of the three, and it’s the one he always tried to evoke in his readers. And make no mistake, terror is an emotion. Horror is something you experience. Terror is the work of the mind, the imagination of what’s absent, of what might be under the rug or around the corner. It is what you live through. Karma: The Dark World has its share of horror, yes. But it is primarily concerned with terror. And more to the point, it is good at it.

There were times during my roughly two-hour demo when I was playing at night, with headphones off, and I had to pause and take a breath. Horror games don’t generally “scare” me. I don’t jump, don’t yell, don’t scream. I know the tricks. But it was two in the morning and I was tired and alone and wearing headphones and something had wormed its way into my brain, and when I had to climb into that vent to enter that blocked-off, red-tinged room, I decided that was enough for the evening.

Karma is full of little moments like that, where you don’t want to go forward, don’t want to bear witness, but you must. Karma is set in an alternate-history 1976, and you’re stepping into the shoes of Roam Agent Daniel McGovern. Daniel is what they call a Nightcrawler. An employee of the omnipresent Leviathan Corporation’s Thought Bureau, he spends most of his time inside other people’s heads. As my demo started, he was being sent to investigate Sean Mehndez, who was accused of stealing something from the Winston Research Institute. You’re to investigate that, as well as an