REVIEW: ‘Ad Infinitum’ — A Harrowing Challenge, If You Can Crack It (PC)

Developed by Hekate and published by Nacon, Ad Infinitum is an atmospheric horror survival game set in Germany just after the First World War. Between the dark and creepy mansion and the trenches of the war front as the game’s main two settings, the game contains ample sources of mystery, puzzle, dread, and regret while the player attempts to discern trauma from reality and unveil their family’s secrets.

Ad Infinitum is the type of game where the more you dig around, reading notes strewn everywhere or clicking on paintings, the more you will uncover its twisted lore. Anything set in post-war Germany with a German protagonist is bound to be filled with the nihilism and trauma that marred veterans of the day. Ad Infinitum has that in spades. Each of the game’s chapters explores another member of your family, your relationship with them, and what kind of monsters they were.

But how you choose to encounter those monsters, whether by slaying them or by choosing to recognize the pain that made them who they were and forgiving them is up to you. The story’s outcome will change dramatically accordingly, making the end of each chapter a true choice for the player based on how they personally feel about forgiveness and consequences.

Before making any of those choices though, you have to play through the game. Chapters are generally split between two segments: one taking place in your family’s mansion and another taking place in a dream-like sequence during the climax of the war. While in the mansion, you’ll traverse its dark hallways following strange sounds and phantom visions egged on by your family members. Throughout these segments, the horror comes in the form of atmosphere more than jump scares. It’s generally admissible for people who don’t naturally cling to the horror genre.

These segments are also where the game’s most ravishingly difficult puzzles take place. Many, many an hour was burned attempting to discern the meaning of singular clues and what steps have to be taken to progress. It never felt unfair necessarily, but at least one puzzle per segment felt so oblique that cracking it barely felt rewarding by the end. It took much more than the average reading of a clue and remembering you had passed something earlier that fits the bill. A series of obvious markers would suddenly end and leave you to your own devices to nearly guess the answer in the end. Surely, when Ad Infinitum has guides written online to offer clues the game won’t divulge, it will help mitigate some of the level of frustration that playing blind offered, but if you are a guideless player, expect to spend hours running around between the same few rooms from time to time.

Once you break past the most challenging puzzles and reach the second stage of each chapter, you enter an even more horrific world that makes real battlefields look like playgrounds. Demons representing the sins of war and the humans who make it stand between you and your journey to absolve yourself of the many traumas your character endures. While physical and navigational puzzles remain in this section, you spend more of your time traversing the battlefield and its trenches avoiding the gaze of these demons lest they destroy you. You’ll encounter more notes and the occasional character along the way to flesh out the background, but the real goal is reaching the final monsters of each chapter and making your choice over how to move on from them. While not especially difficult to crack, these final encounters are intense and exciting as a reward for surviving their preceding horrors.

Ad Infinitum is a little off balance when it comes to how difficult and unfair a few of its challenges are compared to the rest of the game, but with enough patience or guidance to make it through those sections, the rest of the game is set at an intense pace, while an excellently creepy atmosphere and a family whose horrors and the trauma they and the war have imparted onto the protagonist fill the game with character.

Ad Infinitum is available September 14th on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.