With the recent releases of Hollow Knight: Silksong, Gears of War: Reloaded, Cronos: The New Dawn, and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, it’s easy to overlook less anticipated titles arriving this month. If you’re an Xbox player, don’t miss the console’s latest addition. Bonus: it also has a colon in its title. Neat!
Landing on Xbox today (September 10) after a few months of PC and PS5 exclusivity — and for just $20 on launch — is Karma: The Dark World. It’s your chance to jump into one of 2025’s most beautiful indie titles, offering a slow-burn thriller that’ll burgle your mind with a high-concept visual style, unnerving themes, and a tense story that just keeps twisting and turning.
Karma: The Dark World is the debut game from indie Chinese developer Pollard Studio, earning its place alongside modern titles that adopt narrative-first, horror-infused non-combat experiences, such as Still Wakes the Deep and Observer. It wears its influences proudly — David Lynch, Silent Hill, George Orwell, and Hideo Kojima — but still feels unlike anything else, thanks to its stunning art direction.
You take on the role of Daniel McGovern, a secret police agent in an alternate East Germany, which is ruled by an all-knowing corporate dictatorship called Leviathan. After years working for ROAM — a futuristic surveillance unit that can literally climb into people’s memories — you wake up in a hospital bed, with no clue who you really are. Things aren’t as they seem; things flicker in and out of existence, faceless bodies are piled high in abandoned rooms, and TV-headed humanoids hold court in Brutalist streets.
Despite its unsettling horror aesthetics, Karma: The Dark World isn’t something that thrives on jump scares or gore, instead opting for deep, psychological unease, because you simply can’t trust your lying eyes. Its pace is slow — occasionally, but rarely, to its detriment — but this clearly deliberate tempo gives you the chance to shoulder the burdens of its oppressive atmosphere and settle into its many puzzles, which regularly trade logic for personal interpretation, and occasionally just vibes.
Karma: The Dark World isn’t flawless. Its script is a bit odd, underserving a clearly adept voice cast, while the controls and lack of speed between walking and running (“slow”, and “a bit less slow”) can feel clunky. For me personally — a history major who specialized in East and West Germany — its setting is a bit too faceless and could really be any former satellite state behind the Iron Curtain. Still, these issues fade into the background as you’re presented with some of the most inventive and subversive artistic creations of 2025.
For $20 at launch ($25 usually), Karma: The Dark World is an unmissable game if you’re looking for your next atmospheric, story-driven experience. If you want to double down, you can even get it in a bundle with Martha is Dead for $40. There’s a good chance you’ll walk away with more questions than answers, but here, the journey’s even more enjoyable than the destination.
If this doesn’t quite sell you on the experience, check out my review of Karma: The Dark World on PS5 from March.
