Posted in: Games, NACON, Video Games | Tagged: Ad Infinitum, NACON, preview

Ad Infinitum Preview: Fighting For Sanity After War

We got to preview the terrors of the psychological horror title Ad Infinitum, as Nacon is releasing the game on PC and consoles in September.

Nacon recently brought us out to try out several games they have on the way, one of them being their latest horror title, Ad Infinitum. The game has been getting promotions for several months now as this new surreal take on the genre, as you fight for both your sanity and your life coming out of The Great War. But up until now it's basically been a lot of images and settings that have been designed to entice and frighten you, but not much sense has been made as to how they all fit together. We got a chance to play a proper demo of the game a short time ago, and here's what we thought.

Ad Infinitum has basically been designed to be one of those games that will stick with you as you play it. The concept is that you play the role of a German soldier during WWI, who appears to be going through a sanity break in several different ways. At times you'll find yourself running through the trenches trying to save yourself from dying, or attempting to fulfill orders given by superiors in the middle of a battle as you avoid being hit by explosives or crawl out of the way of bullets whizzing by your head. You constantly hear the sounds of your fellow soldiers meeting their fate, or crying out in agony as you attempt to not find your fate here on the battlefield. However, these moments are ripped away as you find yourself back at home, apparently being attended to by your family as it becomes clear that you survived the war, but came back changed.

The game is a mixture of stealth survival and puzzle solving, wrapped in elements of horror that tend to leave you unnerved, at the very least. When you're at home, you find yourself wandering the halls of a grand estate, hearing the voices of your family throughout the halls but never finding them, reading newspaper clips and other notes left about the house. In the demo, the first time we were in the home, we had to make our way around to find a specific room to conduct a seance. Once we were able to find the correct set of doors to unlock, we were then tasked with putting the right tools together to make the seance happen. Which included locating candles around the home and placing them in specific spots on the table. Once everything was in place, the seance was conducted and we found ourselves having a new experience with the spirits from beyond.

From there, we were thrust back into the WWI setting we encountered at the start, but changed. This time the horror elements really crept into Ad Infinitum, as we were met with a different kind of reality where it seemed there were creatures all around who meant us harm. At this point, the dynamic changed from being a survival situation to being more of a stealth run. Throughout the level, we encountered traps and settings that would cause noise and attract these new creatures to us. We were still seeing and hearing elements from the war everywhere, but it felt like something new was now invading this space. Bleeding in from an unknown source, being very different and yet familiar. This clearly worked to unnerve us and make us question what we were truly experiencing. Were we seeing a warped version of our memories, or was it something worse coming to take over our minds?

The one drawback the demo had was that there was clearly a third storyline happening in our minds whenever we would go back to the war. The war and the time home are two different elements, but the minute these creatures make their appearance, it's clear a third element has come to take over, and it's almost hard to keep track of what's real and what isn't in terms of the narrative. It's presented as if you should know what's going on or at least have an idea of what you're doing, but all of it is foreign to the actual setting. If the devs were looking to confuse you and put you on edge while playing, they succeeded. ut they also left themselves in a bit of a trap as they now have three different threads going on that you need to keep track of to make sense of who you are and where you're going.

Ad Infinitum was a pretty cool experience, but at the same time, it feels like we're missing a LOT of context in this demo. That's not to say it was a bad game or downgrade it in any way; it just feels like there are elements of this we're not completely experiencing that probably add more to what we saw. But we're willing to forgive because its a demo and not at all the finished product, which we will see sometime in September.

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