The Haunted Hoard: Dark Atlas: Infernum (PS5)

In Dark Atlas: Infernum, the appearance of humanoid monsters and the stars above shifting has lead to widespread societal collapse. Unable to gel their religious beliefs with what seems like Hell on Earth, people have turned to cultish admiration of the very monsters that kill them and even destroy nearby areas with their mere existence. You, however, are Natalia Asensio, Grand Master of the Night Council, a group that has been looking into the supernatural for centuries and may have the knowledge and resources to turn back this world-threatening incursion of the unknown. Sadly though, Natalia has amnesia and almost all of her expertise is irrelevant, leaving her caring more instead about her estranged son than her life’s work or the safety of the rest of the planet.

 

The first person stealth horror game Dark Atlas: Infernum does get off to a promising start at least in showing how the world has deteriorated in the wake of the Umbra clouds that alter reality and signal the arrival of the unnatural Imprints that often look like fleshless humans. However, after getting a bit of time to see the dire hellish state of a modern city, Natalia is captured by an individual calling himself The Word. The Word seeks to explore Natalia’s mind for the kind of tools the Night Council had access to, aiming to use them for his selfish ends instead of helping the world in decline. The Word’s voice acting is actually pretty perfect for his role as an eerie tormentor who enjoys being enigmatic and toying with Natalia, a fine human villain to work towards taking down compared to the more inexplicable Imprints that can’t be fully comprehended. Natalia, on the other hand, has her voice actress overacting a fair bit, yelling and sobbing too easily in ways that make it hard to take her seriously. She’ll be tearfully recounting how she missed her young son’s Christmas performance as if it was more terrible than the way the rest of humankind has turned towards barbarism and cultish rituals in the aftermath of the strange shifts to the world. It’s hard to get too invested in her saving her son when he’s mostly just an object for her to be sad over rather than someone we learn much about and Natalia’s position as leader of the Night Council feels wasted since she has no expertise or even enthusiasm for saving the world now that she’s an amnesiac.

At the same time, Dark Atlas: Infernum clearly takes place in a world more interesting than what it’s willing to show. Radio broadcasts can be found that give you a gradual telling of how the world slowly learned of the Imprints and how they manifest in surprisingly interesting ways. While you will mostly encounter the humanoid ones that will hunt you down and kill you, you hear about periods where Imprints simply stood in place and froze the nearby area, seemingly without thought or emotion. Later you hear of giant oddly shaped monstrosities with names like The Lion and The Mask that turn major cities into sites of mass death. The radio shows give this picture of a slowly building disaster with many striking potential images as humanity as a whole comes to grips with what is happening, and again this could have played well into your connections to the Night Council if the tale wasn’t instead about a woman realizing she was too busy trying to save the world to pay attention to her son. It wasn’t too surprising to learn that Dark Atlas: Infernum is actually part of a wider media franchise called the Radiata Saga that has other media like a book and podcast exploring the setting, but your window into it isn’t making the best use of the shared elements. There’s a few issues with the translation from Spanish too, mostly in the subtitles compared to better handled voicework, but at least all of these elements do lead to The Word sending you into mental reconstructions of areas like the Night Council’s headquarters The Watchful Angel or an urban space after the earlier days where Imprints started turning hostile.

 

When playing through Dark Atlas: Infernum, you’ll spend a good bit of time being able to explore in safety even outside of the more forgiving  nearly monster-free Story difficulty. Clearly the game wants you to have some time to soak in some visually impressive interior spaces and with many puzzles being tied to finding the right objects around a set of connected locations, it was wise to give the player some time to get used to the area and even start collecting objects before they have to start hiding from the Imprints and the rare other monster. The Imprint starts off a somewhat simple fiend, skulking around and starting to run towards you if it spots you. If it catches you it’s an instant kill, and there’s not too much you can do if the Imprint has decided to patrol around an area of importance besides wait and hope. You do eventually get a device called the Clypeus that is a mix of a flashlight and a telescope, it able to reveal hidden writing in the environment helpful for some puzzles or navigating maze-like areas, but it comes with an unfortunate caveat. After you acquire it, Imprints are then made invisible, and while you might notice the mild red light that still radiates from their eye, it still makes it much easier to accidentally end up in a fatal situation. If you focus your Clypeus on them long enough you will make them flee although it’s not wholly reliable, but sometimes an Imprint might get stuck in place or not even show up for quite a while, alleviating some tension but also leaving you mostly running around hoping to find the next object you need to take somewhere else.

You do still need to treat Imprints as dangerous often enough that Dark Atlas: Infernum remains a stealth game where sneaking around and hiding in lockers may still have value, and there are at least usually puzzles about interpreting some information to cap off the periods more about having item collection as an excuse to send you running back and forth through an occupied area. Dark Atlas: Infernum is even a little kind in that any time you enter an area where a monster can potentially kill you it will make an autosave, but this unfortunately is the only good thing about a save system that can’t be done manually and can go surprising stretches without activating a new save. There are glitches like an altar that wasn’t possible to interact with that forced me to perform a game reset to fix, some issues leading to potentially long periods of careful exploration lost.

 

The variety in the spaces you explore can captivate the imagination for a bit at least, so while they are not as intriguing as what is relayed by the radio reports, they could have hosted puzzle solving and monster avoiding well if those were handled a bit better. The detailed environments can sometimes be a hindrance when backtracking as often as is necessary, needing to keep a mental map important only for an Imprint encounter to potentially set you back and lead to more wandering around to get back to where you were. Near the end, the game does start leaning even more into its supernatural elements, focusing on more ethereal and unnerving sights as spaces you explore are more clearly corrupted by the apocalyptic elements, and a push towards linearity also makes for a few small but interesting actions like trying to follow heat sources to avoid freezing to death or exploring smaller spaces with eerie chanting and uncertainty on whether you’re hearing a true danger or just some mood setting horror. Neither the open area flight from Imprints nor the uncontested walks through more supernatural spaces feel like they’re quite there to pull the experience together into something worth seeing though, especially with a lot of the potentially compelling content likely to be found in the other projects set in the same universe.

THE VERDICT: Dark Atlas: Infernum constructs some great explorable spaces and its radio broadcasts speak of a fascinating setting, but you are sadly stuck sneaking around the same sometimes invisible Imprints trying to avoid instant deaths to deliver items to the other side of huge areas. The game can set a tone well and there are moments where the stealth does work properly, but even not counting some glitches and checkpointing issues, Dark Atlas: Infernum squanders a lot of its premise as Natalia’s amnesia means she isn’t the intriguing Grand Master of the Night Council but a blank slate with a cliche motivation of wanting to see her neglected son again.

 

And so, I give Dark Atlas: Infernum for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. Despite the instant kills, Dark Atlas: Infernum thankfully doesn’t play too rough with you when the monsters are moving around, the checkpoints that should trigger more often during peaceful moments at least understanding they should activate before losses can come swiftly and sometimes from an unseen source. The Imprints turning invisible isn’t actually as much of a concern as it first sounds mostly because they’re often not capable save where they’re lurking in the exact spaces you need to be, but you do still get a bit more tension from the uncertainty and they do have one trick good for causing some appropriate nervousness. Even before you’re too near to them, your screen will start to chill to indicate they’re nearby, a prelude to a need to be sneakier than usual or a signal to start heading in the opposite direction. It’s a kindness in a game that can have dark cramped spaces where you do need that time to potentially find a locker to huddle in or a moment to find an alternate route, and it would be a good tool in a horror game that could handle its monsters better. Natalia though feels even more squandered. The Night Council at least has a material effect on things since you get to explore the elaborate spaces where they sought to understand the esoteric, but Natalia feels almost like she could have been a regular woman bumbling into this all rather than someone with a personal connection. It is somewhat understandable the game might want to keep the scope limited rather than showing something like the towering Lion devastating a city and delving into the upheaval of religious systems would be more complicated than the narrative it seems interested in, but besides utilizing the Clypeus as a slightly better flashlight it feels like the potential behind being a leader of a secret society is lost on a run of the mill story that doesn’t even devote enough time to make the motherly angst go beyond surface level woes.

 

Dark Atlas: Infernum had the makings of a more compelling and unique horror game but it decided to lean instead on well-trodden ideas that it had little enthusiasm for realizing well. We have a supernatural world that sounds far more intriguing on the radio than what little bits you get to see in person and a protagonist who rejects a personal connection to events for a bland motivation closer to a 90s comedy film. Even the gameplay is an all too familiar horror game format of helplessly hiding from wandering monsters mostly, and while asking for a game to be something completely different is foolish, the more imaginative elements are sidelined. Hopefully they see more exploration in other media set in the same world, but Dark Atlas: Infernum feels like it wasn’t adventurous enough to make the most of its environments, lore, or protagonist.