The Haunted Hoard: Ad Infinitum (PS5)
The horrible monsters we come up with in our imagination can’t compare with the brutality of war making monsters out of human beings. World War I was a particularly brutal conflict, caught between a time when weapons were advanced enough to be ruthlessly effective yet ideas of what constitute a war crime had yet to really be established and enforced. Life in the trenches could make for a horror game all on its own, but the narrative horror game Ad Infinitum manifests the psychological toll of serving in The Great War as monsters that must be overcome, the personifications of a soldier’s post-traumatic stress adding creative monster designs over top harsh realism.
One of the most interesting choices made with how Ad Infinitum portrays the war is by making it a very personal tale of the character you wouldn’t expect to get the focus. While the tale uses World War I as its setting, its pays the most attention to the plight of the von Schmidt family where two sons fought for the German side. Johannes von Schmidt is a more sensitive and artful type, one who was swept into trying to help the country from an idealistic standpoint and quickly learned how terrible the truth of warfare is. You do not play as Johannes though, instead taking on the role of Paul von Schmidt who buys into all the jingoistic tales of his decorated grandfather and even gets an unearned position of power in the military so that he’s the one sending men to their death rather than being routinely exposed to the brutal conditions and beleaguered trench warfare like his brother. Paul could have very much been some minor villain in a war story, the callous inexperienced officer in need of comeuppance, but instead we join him after he returns home from the war, joining him as he gradually comes to learn about not just the reality of the war, but the toll it had on his family.
Most of the game’s four chapters are split into two sections. One sees you controlling Paul in first person as he explores the family estate while the other will see him returning to the front in some form, the game relying on the surreal and psychological to pull you into distorted representations of places meaningful to Paul or his family so it can show you both realistic horrors and the more monstrous personifications of pain and anguish that metaphorically patrol these battlefields. The house sections aren’t quite as captivating as the trenches either in concept or what supernatural occurrences occur within, the player doing some light puzzle solving and experiencing subtler eerie events while exploring the estate. However, while exploring a large spooky mansion misses some points on originality, it is also crucial to helping you understand the von Schmidt family, the focus on the brothers, their parents, and their grandfather allowing parts of this war story to hit on a more emotional level. It is one thing to know the anguish of a soldier on the battlefield, it is another to learn of them carrying that pain home and how it rattles their family and their understanding of the world as well. Unsettling in an entirely different manner than the grotesque creatures you’ll encounter in the more phantasmagorical sections in the trenches, the emotional toll and the shattered perceptions of reality that the Great War can lead to for a family are what you’re gradually uncovering during the house section, adding an important and effective layer of personal suffering that puts events into perspective. Those soldiers aren’t just boots on the ground in an awful battle, they each likely have people at home undergoing similar strife.
A more textured picture of the impact of the brutality of The Great War provides the subtle depth that isn’t quite as captivating in the moment as actually seeing the battlefields where the von Schmidts receive their physical and mental scars, but it is necessary to building up the context that makes those trips out into the trenches meaningful. You will find notes left by other soldiers with their own troubles so it’s not purely the von Schmidt’s giving their perspective on the mental strain the conflict causes, but fleshing it out as a story of a soldier and his family helps to better transplant you into the mindset of a person who served rather than potentially reducing Paul down to a weapon used to wage war. In fact, while you are given a gun at a few points, this cannot really be called a shooter as it can almost feel more like a prop of narrative importance rather than a means of interacting with the world. Ad Infinitum is no action game, and I even avoided using the term “survival horror” because while there are moments monsters threaten the player, it isn’t made too difficult to survive your encounters. Rather than the threat to your life being the focus, encounters with unusual manifestations of the pained emotions experienced by groups of people or specific characters are often solved by escaping or a bit of simple stealth. Most of the time you can explore at your own pace, appreciating the moody atmosphere or leaping at occasional jump scares as you try to scrounge up useful information on the conflict. What you encounter is definitely meant more to disturb than endanger you, but that doesn’t mean Ad Infinitum is just about walking about and experiencing the story by any means.
Ad Infinitum does have moments of proper danger and conflict. Checkpoints and the ability to mash a button to escape being grabbed make it so being pursued or trying to outmaneuver monsters isn’t always too difficult, but they are still something you need to consider. Some enemies will stalk you whenever you don’t have a flashlight shining on them, meaning you need to consider the space you’re navigating to outmaneuver them after you look away. Others try to track you by sound or charge through stretches of the trench like a runaway vehicle, but you also have more realistic worries like barbed wire and toxic gas to concern yourself with. Ad Infinitum also features some true boss fights and ones of pretty great significance. Representing people rather than merely being monsters, the bosses often embody the psychological trauma of someone you know, the boss fight not about overpowering them but instead using something on hand to decide whether to try to heal their pain or put them out of it. There are multiple endings based on how you treat these fights, and these fights do try to make it clear what the alternative method of defeating them is. While not exactly a tough moral choice, it does add a touch of challenge as the kinder route involves a bit more work to do properly. It does play well into the choice of protagonist too, Paul being tested on whether he came to empathize with others more or he could rather believably be said to still hold some of those misguided ideas passed down to him by his accomplished grandfather.
Since Ad Infinitum leans so psychological though, you won’t get too many active moments of examining moments out in the trenches. It’s often lonely exploration where you find records telling you about how the war went and you see the aftermath by way of destruction and the corpses of the fallen. The game is ultimately a reflection back on the war after serving so it makes some sense, although the reality bending could have likely pushed you into more involved demonstrations of what perturbed your fellow soldiers so much or made you more deeply consider the moment by steeping you in it rather than reading an account of it. Not allowing it to devolve into a war game was certainly key to keeping its message clear though, some time serving in a video game army not going to carry the same emotional toil. Having monsters with gruesome designs to horrify you can possibly be an attempt to help tear down the protective barrier of fiction a touch, it much easier to fear some malicious abomination than things like trenchfoot or morally objectionable orders from on high.
THE VERDICT: Ad Infinitum effectively juxtaposes the terrible realities of World War I with monstrous manifestations of emotional pain that can more effectively threaten the player. While your empathy aches for those who experienced such terrible things, you are not merely observing and reading about it, shoved into situations that are more impactful in a horror video game. The difficulty is kept low which might hurt the messaging a bit but also makes it approachable more as a narrative adventure despite a few puzzles and moments of active peril, but Ad Infinitum is able to communicate the realistic horror of early 20th century warfare while providing interactive elements that aren’t so brutal that you would walk away drained by this bleak tale.
And so, I give Ad Infinitum for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. A story-first kind of horror game to be sure, Ad Infinitum perhaps wisely realized you can’t put a gun in a player’s hands and have them effectively experience the mindset of a soldier at war. Too easily one could slip into treating this like a standard shooter, especially since there’s no moral weight behind killing a fictional video game character who can come back to life if you just reload a checkpoint. Instead, Ad Infinitum focuses its attention on eerie empty spaces occupied mostly by you or some monster that poses a threat to you to place some terror in your heart closer to the helplessness of futilely engaging in long conflicts in the Great War’s trenches. Paul being the point of view character was certainly an effective choice, even though his mostly silent nature means it takes a while for some of his thoughts on the war to start being more closely examined, but peeling away the veneer of glorious battle assigned to conflict is an important piece of the game’s bundle of themes. Rather than immersing you into the actual warfare, Ad Infinitum instead reminds you of the humanity tied to it all by making so much of your investigative efforts tie to the von Schmidt family. A mother’s anguish, a father’s shame, a brother’s scars, the narratives tied to these effects of the conflict can be constructed to convey their intended emotional impact, but there are still creative sights and some involved moments that go beyond searching for notes so Ad Infinitum isn’t just wallowing in depictions of misery. The house sections still perhaps could have been made a bit brisker since they aren’t as compelling as the time in the trenches and the monsters didn’t need to be so easily outmaneuvered, but this also makes Ad Infinitum an easy game to approach for people intrigued by the choice of topic but perhaps intimidated by what their role as the player could be.
Ad Infinitum doesn’t mine World War I as an easy source for horror, it tries to properly provide a range of perspectives on how awful it was to experience while trying to also evoke an emotional response from the player by way of horrors that they can feel. Deadly monsters may not match the terror in having to turn your weapon on your fellow man, but their unsettling designs and the dangers they pose can at least ensure this isn’t some atmospheric tour of the trenches. Ad Infinitum can mix the real and fictional horrors and get you to ruminate on what you find because of the personal nature of much of what you uncover, this narrative adventure doing its concept justice.