Infernium

I did not like Infernium the first time I played it. Hell, even after spending an hour investigating the dungeons and draining balls of energy, I found the game frustrating and not much fun to play. But I'm glad I stuck with it, because once I was able to get beyond my initial confusion and helplessness, I discovered a wonderfully rich and compelling adventure that is all about problem solving and discovery. Infernium is the Dark Souls and Pac-Man mash-up you didn't know you wanted.

This is a baffling game, by design. We're dropped into a mysterious world with no information. We don't know who we are, where we are or even what's going on. All we know is that it's somehow possible to teleport by charging up your hand and that there are little balls of energy sitting around that are just waiting to be sucked dry. But through a combination of exploration and dying a bunch of times, we'll learn all about this unusual setting and what you're doing there.

I know people are sick of hearing every challenging game compared to Dark Souls, but it's more than appropriate here. Infernium has done what a lot of the Dark Souls sequels have not, which is give me a real sense of wonder and discovery. It looks like a simple first-person dungeon crawler at the start, but the moment you stray away from the path you'll uncover a secret world that is bigger and deeper than you could have imagined. It's the kind of game where you'll immediately want to compare notes with other players, especially when it comes to discovering the secrets and deciphering the cryptic story.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because it's worth exploring what you're supposed to be doing in this strange world. In its simplest form, this is a game about running through mazes and picking up glowing orbs. This sounds easy, until you realize that there are these ghostly cloaked guards haunting the halls that will kill you in a single hit. And you know what happens when you get killed by a ghost? You drop all the orbs you've collected and warp back to the last campfire you made.

Believe it or not, it's actually worse than that. What isn't immediately clear is that you only have 25 lives to play around with before you're sucked into a pool of toxic black goo and have to start the whole thing all over from the beginning. Dying means going to something of a purgatory stage, where your lives will be displayed by, you guessed it, big glowing orbs. Permadeath can be frustrating, but this purgatory stage is where I first noticed that there was more going on than met the eye. Like I said, the deeper you dig, the more you're going to find.

The reason I was initially frustrated by Infernium has a lot to do with the leisurely pace of our hero. He's not especially fast and his teleporting dash takes a little too long to charge up. To make matters worse, sucking the energy out of those glowing balls takes a few seconds, which is time you don't have when there's a ghost chasing you. It often felt like you would drop all your stuff in the worst possible spots, and I kept dying trying to retrieve the orbs. I couldn't figure out why it took so long to do everything in this game.

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But instead of succumbing to my frustration, I spent that time exploring the surroundings and realizing that there's usually a way to outsmart the ghosts. And not just that, but you'll quickly realize that you don't need to pick up every orb you see. In fact, there are strategic reasons to avoid many of the orbs you run across. The game will also become easier as you find items and upgrades, such as a flashlight and the ability to teleport greater distances.

As we keep digging, we'll discover that you don't always have to run from every enemy. In fact, there are some bad guys that you'll be able to melt with your flashlight hand. We also uncover that there may be a way to fill up those giant orbs in purgatory, meaning that you may have more than 25 lives after all. The game has a funny way of introducing new ideas every time you think you've wrapped your head around this baffling world.

Much like Dark Souls, much of that world is connected. While the path seems linear at first, simply straying off course a little will reveal shortcuts and doors you can open that will make navigating the castles and dungeons a lot easier. It also offers branching paths, giving us a chance to sample several types of puzzles and locations as we try to make heads or tails of this game.

While I ended up loving the exploration and discovery, there are a few things that pulled me out of the experience. One of the big problems is that the game is incredibly frustrating, even in moments when you know exactly what to do. This was the case with most of the time puzzles. It's exciting to race around a maze dodging ghosts, but some of the puzzles have almost no margin for error. It doesn't help that the campfires are few and far between, meaning that there's a lot of backtracking involved every time you retry a puzzle.

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I also suspect that some people will be put off by the trial and error gameplay. For the most part, I'm fine with this, since so much of the game revolves around you figuring out this unusual world. But there are certainly times when Infernium pushes things too far, especially when it comes ghosts popping out of nowhere. This game is purposely challenging and you're going to die a lot of times, so go in with the expectation that you're going to learn something new from every attempt.

Infernium was developed by Carlos Coronado, who had previously impressed with the extra-trippy game MIND: Path to Thalamus. His new release feels a little more grounded, but is no less stylish. This is a good looking game with a lot of different kinds of locations to explore. It does a good job of making the various dungeons and corridors feel unique, and the scope of the world is certainly impressive. This is a developer to keep an eye on.

Infernium is frustrating, confusing, aggravating, baffling and occasionally unfair, but it's also one of the few games I've played this year to leave me in awe. It's not for everybody and it may take you a few tries before it's fun, but there's a world of discovery hidden away in this strange and hostile game. Infernium demands that you dig a little deeper.