
‘Karma: The Dark World' Review (PS5): Beauty And The East
As the debut title for independent Chinese developer Pollard Studio, Karma: The Dark World is the latest in a long line of non-combat, slow-paced, first-person thriller games in the vein of Still Wakes the Deep. It draws inspiration from Twin Peaks, Alan Wake, Silent Hill, and anything Hideo Kojima had his hands on, as well as George Orwell — entirely unsurprising, given its setting.
Its trailer gives only a taste of the absolute madness you'll experience over its 10-to-12-hour running time — and its sumptuous art direction, under the watchful eye of Ke Yang — and it's unlike anything you'll have ever seen before, even though Karma's influences are very clear.
You take on the role of Daniel McGovern, a secret police agent in an alternate universe version of East Germany, which has been taken over by the all-seeing, all-knowing corporate dictator, Leviathan. Luckily, you're on their side, working as a member of ROAM, a technocratic uber-Stasi whose interrogators can dive into the minds and memories of suspects.
You start proceedings on a hospital bed, with no memory of who you are, and a trio of plugs sticking into your arm, which gives you the impression you're dressed like Psycho Mantis. Still, that's the least of your problems; you gaze out of the window to see cars and birds flicker in and out of reality, plus a dead body that doesn't.
Karma: The Dark World combines its initial game calibration with the perfect introduction to a quietly malicious world. It's 1984. You're scared and alone, faced with weird tests that check your audio settings, as you play tapes which calmly recite passages about 'trampled humans' and their 'dying cries'. You calibrate your field of vision in an oddly sanitised room. Then you walk into a room filled with baths, in which 'potted,' mannequin-like humans sit in dirt. Less (more?) fortunate cadavers are piled in a corner.
The worst type of mudbath.
Pollard Studio
Soon, you meet a disabled man who promises answers, but not before he puts you into a chair and plunges you into the past. Via a quick flashback to 1968, in which you're 'onboarded' to the world by Leviathan agents acting on behalf of MOTHER — this world's Big Brother character — you begin to explore memories that constantly blur the lines between cold, boring reality and manic, Lynchian delirium.
Karma: The Dark World is a slow game, both in its exposition and its occasionally frustrating slow walking speed. However, this world demands you pay attention to the minutiae, both to solve its puzzles and to slowly understand the sheer depths of its repressive world.
While it has horror characteristics, Karma is much more of a dystopian thriller; if you're worried about gore or jump scares, don't be. It has two or three 'shock' moments, but none of them quite connect to lift you out of your seat, or force a shower and change of clothing.
Mannequins. Of course there are mannequins.
Pollard Studio
That's not to say you won't feel sick to your stomach, because you never trust the world around you, even when it looks like a simple office or quiet street. Much like Still Wakes the Deep, even the most solid-looking walls can disappear in the blink of an eye.
Much like its setting, Karma: The Dark World is dripping with allegories and metaphors, to the point you don't ever feel like you know or necessarily understand the story. You might perceive this as its main weakness, mainly because it doesn't come close to giving you any real answers for hours, but it soon becomes its core strength. Apt, really, given how Orwellian it is.
You wonder if those people with TVs for heads are an allegory, or really do have CRTs on their necks. memories are selective in the minds of people you explore, so is that ten-foot-tall monster really a hulking brute, or a symbol of something else?
And how exactly are you smoking that, anyway?
Pollard Studio
Still, specific issues remain consistently clear, including the helpless despair faced by both leading characters — most notably, Sean Mehndez — and broader society, which you watch fall under the ever-tightening grip of slavery by a faceless dictator that issues heartbreaking decrees and forces unfortunates into drug-fuelled bureaucracy. Read into it what you will, but you'll be reminded of many bêtes noires of the 21st century: authoritarianism, AI, surveillance, and more.
For all its storytelling and artistic strengths, Karma: The Dark World offers a handful of annoyances along the way. The first is the control system on PS5, which feels poorly optimized; 'sprinting' is bound to L1, your inventory is on Square, and you open doors and drawers with the right stick, but only by holding the interact button (X, but also R2?). Combined with an imprecise reticle, this can be really annoying, though luckily the slow pace of the game doesn't mean you need accuracy under pressure.
Meanwhile, the voice acting is genuinely strong, but the script can often let the talent down. It's worst with player-character Daniel, who often responds to deep and meaningful exposition as if he's deaf, forcing him to lash out like a confused child and repeat the same queries and concerns that have already been answered — and in a frustratingly child-like tone.
Ah great, more mannequins.
Pollard Studio
Critically, the most disappointing element of Karma: The Dark World is that it doesn't make the most of its East German setting. The GDR is arguably the most fascinating failed state in history, but I can't recall one explicit mention of it throughout the game. Pollard Studio adopts a catch-all 'concrete totalitarianism' approach, but does away with iconography, art styles, and even the German language. For history fans, it amputates a huge selling point of the game, making it feel like it could be set in any European country of that era.
FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™
Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase
Pinpoint By Linkedin
Guess The Category
Queens By Linkedin
Crown Each Region
Crossclimb By Linkedin
Unlock A Trivia Ladder
For all these minor faults, Karma: The Dark World should be on the list for any fan of slow-burn thrillers like Layers of Fear, Soma, or Observer. Puzzles, in particular, are very rewarding, and areas in which you find them are carefully restricted so you stay focused on fewer moving parts or clues. A particular late-game room with four clocks was a real air-puncher when I finally figured it out — few games can be so consistently satisfying.
What's more, Pollard Studio should be celebrated for creating one of the most stunning games of 2025. While its technical performance doesn't match the heights of Kojima or Remedy's most recent work, Karma: The Dark World consistently hits the mindbending heights of its artistic vision. I'm still piecing the story and its meanings together over a week since completing the game, and that's entirely because certain scenes and ideas have lived rent-free in my head since I put the controller down.
For $25, Karma: The Dark World really does need to be played to be understood — or not understood, as the case often proves — but its weirdness, beauty, and strange approach to puzzles are truly rewarding. Much like Fear the Spotlight, the ending isn't the end, either, and even if you did platinum it, you'll still feel like you've missed something. Maybe that's the point.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Cosmopolitan
9 hours ago
- Cosmopolitan
4 Happy Gilmore 2 celebrity cameos as fans call Travis Kelce "iconic"
Happy Gilmore 2 dropped on Netflix on Friday, and fans have flocked in their droves to watch the sequel of Adam Sandler's iconic 1996 film. The movie follows Sandler as he reprises his role as Happy Gilmore, who has long retired from golfing. But, when his daughter needs money for her ballet classes, the golf prodigy dusts off his driver and enters the sporting world once more. Alongside bringing back a classic '90s movie character, Happy Gilmore 2 also secured a long list of high-profile talent, both as part of the main cast and in cameos. In terms of the latter, there was one celebrity fans couldn't wait to see grace their screens. Yep, we're talking about Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, and who also happens to be dating Taylor Swift. Here, we take a look at Kelce's minor (see: major) role — which fans have since called "iconic" — plus some of the other killer cameos: During press for the movie, Adam Sandler told an interviewer that he saw Kelce on Saturday Night Live and thought the footballer was "unbelievably funny and confident." After hearing that Kelce wanted to be involved in the film, Sandler revealed they wrote a part for him, and he was "cool enough to say yes." The cameo sees Kelce switching the football pitch for a posh restaurant, playing a brown-nosing club waiter. He stars as Bad Bunny's character's (another perfect cameo) rival, who gets his comeuppance at the end of the film. We won't say anything else other than Kelce ends up sans shirt... Of course, fans (of both Kelce and Taylor Swift) went wild for the pop culture moment. From people calling it "legendary," to confirming that he "killed" it, others naturally quoted Swift. Specifically, her 2022 song 'Karma' from the album Midnights. "KARMA IS THE GUY ON THE SCREEN," one fan penned, as another echoed: "Taylor making sure she can keep saying 'guy on the screen.'" Someone else also quoted Swift's single, 'Style,' writing: "HE GOT THAT LONG. HAIR. SLICKED. BACK." Bad Bunny also made a surprise appearance as none other than Happy Gilmore's new caddy. Credited as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the rapper and producer's character hilariously has zero golf knowledge, despite his new role. Naturally, that makes the performance 10x funnier. Hardcore fans of Happy Gilmore will remember the character of Donald, played by the late Joe Flaherty. In the film, he would constantly heckle Gilmore, shouting "Jackass" just as he was about to tee off. This time around, Eminem plays Donald's son, Donald Jr., who follows in his father's footsteps and yells the same insult. Post Malone was another famous face who made it into the movie. The rapper appears in the film towards the end as fictional DJ Omar Gosh (Get it?). He appears as a celebrity commentator at the final golf tournament. Happy Gilmore 2 is now streaming on Netflix.


Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
A professor's hunt for the rarest Chinese typewriter
It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices he'd hunted down. But there was one typewriter that Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Only one -- the prototype -- was ever made. Advertisement 'It was the one machine,' he said recently, 'which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.' Mullaney's mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything. Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language -- around 100,000, by some estimates -- there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost. Advertisement Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole. It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter? Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor's take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable -- a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology. Mullaney was fascinated. That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise. He cold-called strangers and left voicemail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, 'Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?' Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Mullaney took it off their hands. Advertisement The MingKwai is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters. It was invented by Lin Yutang, a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically -- perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers. Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine. Lin's solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened. Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Mullaney said, Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet. He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to 'clear and fast.' Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan's Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer. Advertisement It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn. And that, as far as Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine's last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared. In his 2017 book, 'The Chinese Typewriter,' Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrap heap. This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Felix's father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. 'What's this?' Jennifer Felix asked her husband. He'd had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it's that typewriter. She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Nelson Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called 'What's My Typewriter Worth?' and posted some photos. Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Nelson Felix checked on his post. There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom. The couple looked at each other. 'Who's Tom?' Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off -- ping, ping, ping. The small community of people he'd encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention. As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai. Advertisement But he didn't rejoice. He didn't sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear. What if they didn't know what they had and sold it before he could get to it? Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that. He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone. He told them the MingKwai's story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon. Jennifer Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement. But Mullaney had made an impression. 'It was lost for half a century,' she said. 'We didn't want it to get lost again.' 'To me it's just a typewriter,' she continued. 'But to other people it's history; it's a story, a life, a treasure.' Instructions and a box of tools were used to cast more Chinese character bars for the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Mullaney figured out that Jennifer Felix's grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It's likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home. Then it was passed down to Felix's father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him. 'That's what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,' Felix said. Advertisement Keys on the MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn't know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds. In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor. This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay down to look at it. The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he'd seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it -- perhaps revealing what was going on in Lin's mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one. Lying on his stomach, Mullaney began to wonder. The MingKwai 9 typewriter. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/NYT This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Scooter Braun addresses if Taylor Swift's revenge track 'Vigilante S---' is about him and his ex
Scooter Braun has seen the theories that Taylor Swift's Midnights revenge track "Vigilante S---" is about him. So is he shaking it off? When asked point-blank if the song's lyrics were about him and his ex-wife, Yael Cohen, Braun had an answer ready. "No, because I talk to Yael every day," Braun said on a new episode of the Question Everything podcast. "My ex-wife is one of my best friends, so me and my ex-wife laugh about that stuff. We don't even call each other 'ex.' That's, like, my partner. That's the mother of my children." In the track, which was released in October 2022, Swift sings, "She needed cold hard proof, so I gave her some / She had the envelope, where you think she got it from? / Now she gets the house, gets the kids, gets the pride / Picture me thick as thieves with your ex-wife / And she looks so pretty, driving in your Benz / Lately she's been dressing for revenge." Braun and Cohen, who share three children, separated in July 2021 and finalized their divorce in September 2022. Given the timing — and all of the previous drama between Swift and Braun over the ownership of Swift's masters that dominated headlines in 2019 — fans did what they do best and speculated that "Vigilante S---" must be about Braun. Swifties also hypothesized that another Midnights track, "Karma," referenced him. The singer has never confirmed whom either song is about, if anyone real. Later on the podcast, Braun insisted that he and Cohen are "family for life." "I have a tattoo on my finger that says 'same team' after my divorce because she and I are on the same team for life," he said. "That's what we say to each other. So no, I never thought that ["Vigilante S---"] was about us. She never thought it was about us, and everyone else kind of feeding into the fire — great strategy move, but, like, nah." After 23 years in the business, Braun announced he was retiring from music management in June 2024. At the time, the entrepreneur and record executive said he was stepping back to focus on his position as CEO of HYBE America and on his family. The news came after he unofficially stepped back the previous year from managing top artists such as Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, both of whom helped kick-start his career in the late 2000s. As for Swift, the saga over the ownership of the masters of her music reached a stunning conclusion in May, when the Tortured Poets Department singer revealed that she had bought back her first six albums. Posting a photo of herself surrounded by the vinyl editions of the records, she wrote, "You belong with me." She then published a lengthy letter on her official website in which she stated, "All the music I've ever me." A representative for Braun sent a statement from him to Entertainment Weekly at the time. It read: "I am happy for her." Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly