Infra

This game felt like it was tailor-made specifically for me. There is literally nothing else like it. Ive searched and never found anything that even came close to what its doing. Im too cowardly to do any urbex and im a massive fan of industry, abandoned or not. The fact it lets me pretend like im exploring abandoned factories is a big part of my enjoyment for the game, but it did so much more. The story is so well told. The game is so full of content, areas you can just miss if youre not exploring fully which the game is recommending you to do with the camera, making sure you get every crack. The multiple endings. The soundtrack fits the game perfectly too. The voice acting is not great for most, except the main character who has a very charming voice.

Overall Infra brings you through extremely well-crafted urban decay environment perfectly matching the mood of being right next to where people are, but never with them. As it walks you along it gives you a ton of hints of the history of where you are, and its relevancy to the history of the city, or how its leading to its downfall.

Could be a good sign youd like this if you like :
urbex, industry, infrastructure, engineering

+ sign for having an extremely accurate looking metro map even if you barely see it like most videogames/movies just puts random squiggly lines this game is definitely made for the kind of people who would actually pay attention to it

Have you ever had an experience in your life that felt as if it was tailor-made for you? Any kind of experience, it could be anything, anything at all that speaks to you, or burrows deep into your heart, in a particularly resonant, meaningful way. An evening walk in the countryside twilight. An early morning spent watching the hours fade from black, to a dark blue, to gold, and to the clear, light blue the day inhabits. Or maybe something more specific, less abstract, maybe you found an album that brought you to tears, or a film that wouldn't vacate your thoughts for weeks after you'd seen it. It's a lovely feeling, isn't it? That sense of pure joy, that kind of personal connection that you nurture with it. I'm lucky enough to have had my fair share, and I've recently added another one to the memory banks, one more rosy engram in my hippocampus, because I've just played Loiste Interactive's INFRA.

Ruminating on "the medium of the review" is often seen as trite, and I would avoid it in any other case, but allow me this indulgence for a moment, I've a good reason for it. There's a certain unspoken protocol with the format, and I think to start this off, I'm going to break it. The typical framework of a review is customarily set out in a way that everything builds up to the ending, to those closing words, or perhaps that final grade, if appropriate. There's nothing wrong with that, either. It's tried and true, as the common saying goes, but I can't talk about INFRA in that way. Not because of an inability to; rather, I think I'd be doing you a disservice, were I to follow that to the letter, considering the circumstances. The fact is, my appreciation - my love - for this game, I'm under no illusions about it, this is as subjective as it gets. All reviews and viewpoints are subjective in the end, of course, but this is something beyond that, and I feel I would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise, that this will be some kind of universal, shared, objective experience. It won't. Most aren't, but this in particular will definitely not, because INFRA is not exactly the poster boy for mass appeal. Instead, I'm going to lay my cards out on the table here at the jump, and hide nothing. Get yourself a glass of water if you need it.

I love this fucking game. As far as I'm concerned, it's a modern-day masterpiece of atmosphere, world-building, tension, and not least of all, beauty.

INFRA is a game that particularly lovestruck me, for many other reasons aside, as you'll soon see, but perhaps the first one that bears mention is that it's the sort of game that doesn't sound like it should exist. That it does at all is a testament to the necessity of independent development. I struggle to compartmentalise it, the best that I've been able to come up with so far is "structural engineering puzzle adventure mystery environmental narrative game"; that last part is probably more familiar to you as the "walking sim". But truthfully, that doesn't even come close to covering all the bases. What is clear, however, is that this game would not have been made by a AAA studio. Imagine how that conversation would go! Hell, you'd probably be fired just for proposing it. Yet, here it is, and by my reckoning, it's borderline damascene. I, as someone with a considerable interest in things like urban planning and architecture on a hobbyist level, as well as what I and a few others have referred to over recent years as "collapse culture" - ramshackle, disused buildings and areas, abandoned places, etc. - was snared instantly, as soon as INFRA's existence was made known to me. I don't imagine most other people were, but I was.

The premise is sparse, but clean. It's August 8, 2016. You control Finnish expatriate Markku Siltanen, or Mark to his friends and co-workers. He plies his trade as a structural analyst and engineer working for the National Consulting Group, an engineering consultancy and repairs company based in Stalburg, the idyllic coastal capital of the fictional Scandinavian country of Stolland, upon the Baltic Sea between Norway and Sweden. NCG, due to recent costly and high-profile errors, is teetering on the edge of disgrace and looking to rebuild its image in the public eye. Luckily, a government contract landed recently to maintain vital infrastructure in and around the city - freed up following a recent profiteering scandal - looks like the ticket, and Mark and his colleagues are sent out to their new domains on what seems at first like normal, rote check-ups, to photograph weaknesses, faults and other causes for concern, as well as to hunt out relevant documentation that had been either lacking or missing entirely in prior reports. As he explores the decades-old infrastructure of Stalburg and the circumambient hinterlands, though, erected during times of both deep-rooted, pervasive state corruption in the 70s and 80s, and the external geopolitical pressure of the Cold War, the realisation of imminent collapse in the present is brutal. And it won't be long until it does. Over ten chapters and three acts, your hosts will be hydroelectric dams, steel mills, subterranean tunnels, storm drains and more. Your mind will need to be sharp, and your eyes, sharper.

Aside from your sight to see, your mind to think and your legs to carry you, you're not going to be wielding much of an arsenal. After all, you're a structural engineer, not a combat specialist; don't expect to be packing heat. Your primary method of collecting and collating structural abnormalities and evidence of negligence is your trusty camera. Spot some damaged concrete? Take a picture. Steam leak? Take a picture. Fallen trees and bent light posts? Take a picture. Caved-in or flooded service tunnels? Snap. Moonshining equipment? Snap. Notes from concerned employees? Snap. Inane pegboard ramblings from an ousted CEO? You'd better fuckin' believe you're snapping a picture of that. You've also got a flashlight, handy for those dark corners and musty corridors, and a phone that you'll primarily be using to make regular reports back to your boss, as well as being fashioned as a diegetic user interface for your pause menu, which is a pretty cute touch. You'll also need to occasionally move around objects in the world, from fuses to restore power to an area, to crates you can climb up on and reach alcoves from, to bricks that you might have to break a window or two with. Be careful though, the battery lives on your camera and flashlight are shot to shit, and though you can pick up packs of replacement batteries to refill them with, if you're careless with what you point them at, you can easily find yourself running out. Eventually, you're so absorbed in the city of Stalburg, that even when you shut the game off, you'll catch yourself idly scanning your real surroundings, or itching to snap a quick picture of some exposed rebar you come across in the wild.

Don't worry though, your activities aren't going to be limited to just taking pictures, reading files, spinning tapes and scaling rubble. Sometimes you'll stumble across something that ain't working right, and probably ought to be. You'll have to get your thinking cap on for these cases, from bits and bobs as small and simple as cracking open a door by turning control knobs, or deciphering jury-rigged electrical wiring, all the way up to restoring operation to real complex, heavy-duty machinery, and entire water treatment plants - and those bigger projects are really gonna put your grey matter to the test. If you're feeling inadequate or overwhelmed, though, on most occasions you can skip these wholly, with little to no effort. Some puzzles (typically, the few mandatory ones) even have certain steps you can take to fuck the situation up even further, in exchange for an easier way out. Stumbled your way into the Pine Fell station and found out it's pumping heavily metal-contaminated water at half capacity into Stalburg's supplies? You wanna take the time to wrap your head around the systems, the pumps, pipes and pools, scour the facility for the keys you need, so you can chlorinate it and set everything in order to make sure the city's water isn't poisoning people... or, listen to that little red devil on your shoulder, and completely shut off the water flow as a whole, just to open up a fast track back underground? The choice is yours, but remember, those choices are going to affect a lot more people than just you, and a lot more lives than your own.

It's not all roses, though. While it'd be unreasonable to expect him to be Faith Connors, Mark isn't exactly ranking on the nimbler side of first-person protagonists. While his sprint speed is decent enough (and thankfully, unrestrained by stamina), his walking pace is unhurried, his crouch speed is best described as glacial, he swims like a concrete block - in that he doesn't - and he's not going to be winning any long jump medals either. Being able to mantle some waist-high obstructions is somewhat of a boon and can be handy on occasion, but it's also a finicky bastard to get working in certain places, and will more than likely require a good few tries from you at its worst. He's also not too hardy - though he can survive some pretty crazy scripted events, while you're the one actually at the helm, he'll topple over after, perhaps not instant, but rather quite minimal exposure to steam, and any drop higher than maybe twice his height is apparently going to snap his shins like Slim Jims. This does add some tension and stakes to the few "action" segments of the game, though, as you'll need to watch your steps carefully and judge some of the world's more dangerous leaps.

It's that world, more than anything else, that proves to be the shining star of the show here, and not just the stunningly crafted environments and locales, but the sense of reality rising from them and the underlying lore behind it all. INFRA might not be taking the frontiers of graphical fidelity to their extremes - there's no individual hair fibres, sophisticated cloth physics, 4K textures or ray traced puddles of piss in urinals - but rather, it reaches that promised land in level design of constructing a believable, immersive realm to explore and adore. From the gilded art deco halls of the Stalburg Central metro station, to the leafy national park in Hammer Valley, to the dusk-bathed isle of Castle Rock, INFRA steals the breath from your lungs at every possible moment, while never seeming to be "too much". Everything you see is conceivable, not a single square inch ever breaks your immersion by encroaching into flights of fancy. To screenshot fiends, and I count myself among them, these levels are like pure black tar skag, hooked up in an intravenous line. It would be easier for me to name the locations that didn't astonish me... were such locations present in the game at all.

Maybe you're thinking, perhaps, that it would be disappointing to move along from these natural wonders and golden vistas, into the concrete halls of power stations, the green gunk of sewage canals and the crumbling foundations of ill-advised constructions. I understand, too, after all, these locations aren't exactly commonly held to be lands of great beauty. My riposte - the sheer authenticity, the dedication to their recreation, perhaps even the gravity of these areas, is what elevates them and makes them the ones that will remain with you the most when your game time is done. These complexes are uncanny, almost ethereal in their vacancy, and as neglected as they may be, awe-inspiring in their detail. Loiste have taken great pains to ensure that Stalburg's infrastructure isn't just an approximation, but accurate to a staggering degree. You'll find no roughly estimated designs, and little-to-nothing in the way of conjecture. If you see it, it's the real thing. If you took the time to grab that glass of water earlier, give it a second look. That water, like as not, went through the same kind of processes as Stalburg's water. It could have gone through the same kind of treatment plant as you can fix in Pitheath, and it could've flowed through the same sort of pipes as under Stalburg Central. Of course, it's not a wholly one-to-one recreation, for example, the computer interfaces you'll work with are much more simplified. You'll find comparatively sleek graphical interfaces in-game, but as someone with a training in IT, you would be surprised just how much of our world's infrastructure is controlled through a command-line interface, if they're even controllable through computer in the first place.

So - how about I let you know that these absolutely gorgeous, finely tuned levels, are all running in an engine from 2004? That's right, these landscapes were somehow wrangled out of that PC gaming staple, Valve's Old Reliable itself, the Source engine. Possibly the most beautiful game I've ever played, certainly the most in recent memory, and it's all masterfully crafted in an engine that, at eighteen years of age, just this month became old enough to purchase alcohol in Britain. Yes, granted, it's been dutifully and lovingly iterated on over the almost two decades we've had it, but to think that this pure flower of a game has so few degrees of separation from Quake that it very well may still have some Carmack in its gears, well, that's bordering on technomancy. This was no means to an end, nor a compromise, either. As you might expect from a team coalesced from former modders, INFRA is a true love letter to the Source engine. The biggest inspiration from other Source works is undoubtedly Half-Life 2 and its two standalone, episodic expansions, but you can draw lines back to all manner of sources - pun very much intended - from the sinister backrooms of Aperture Science in Portal, and the otherworldly emptiness of The Stanley Parable's offices, right through to the streets of Santa Monica in Troika's gothic cult classic Bloodlines. The love and care that was put into making Stalburg, that love wasn't just for Stalburg itself, but a deeply held regard for the very engine it was built in.

Don't let my unmitigated gushing about the visuals fool you, the game isn't merely a pretty face, but god fucking damn, it's hard to NOT talk about that vivid visage. My initial playthrough left me close to tears on multiple occasions from how, for lack of a better term, overwhelmed I was with some of its locations, and almost all of them retained that quality when embarking on my second playthrough. No doubt, my own biases in aesthetic preference may have left me more susceptible to such overtures, I won't deny that, but for it to work for me on such a high level, I'm certain that this goes beyond simple appeal. If I had to nitpick a few things, I suppose I would say the first act has a couple of textures that don't hold up to close scrutiny, and the bloom is also rather overdone in a few levels in the act. The mini-train service tunnels, too, didn't hold as much enjoyment for me on my second visit, though they were the only part to come to mind - accurate as they are, they might be a bridge too far for even Loiste to make everlasting wonders out of, with their necessitated monotony, but considering how magnificently on-the-mark they were with everything else (even on a replay), this, frankly, doesn't even register as the smallest of blips on my radar.

With the aforementioned minimal premise, if you had figured the story might lack somewhat in nuance and depth, well, it wouldn't be a particularly unfair assumption to make, but you'd still be mistaken once again. The story and lore of INFRA, of the two games it shares a universe with, Open Sewer and VALTA, and the chronicles of Stalburg and its surrounds, are expansive and engrossing. A rich history underpins this world, rich enough to warrant a full 45 minutes (and change) of summary via a duo of YouTube videos by the user RemmitingFall. Of course, that kind of thing will spoil a lot of the story, so hold your fire on it if that's a worry for you. So much of it is barely even touched upon in the game, but you'll still find more than you expect if you know where to look; newspapers strewn across Stalburg aren't just for show, you can take a gander at them, and you should, because they'll give you insights into the fall of companies formed centuries ago and bankrupted decades ago, as well as juicy little morsels and minutiae of the modern day, from football results to union strikes. Those small things ground you, and can sometimes point you the right way in a pinch - a scrawled note on a piece of paper might let you know the location of those missing keys you're looking for, or a long-abandoned maintenance log could mention a structural defect you didn't pick up on before.

INFRA isn't just machines and machinations, though. The glistening façade of Stalburg, as it does in the game itself, also hides something much more sinister under the surface - more literally than you might expect. Pick up one of those newspapers, and between stories of political pissantry, crushed companies and other goings-on, you might catch a mention or two of a supposed haven for the homeless, a full-blown underground city, stashed away 'neath foundations and fallout shelters. Some call it utopia, some call it the dominion of a death cult, and some say it's probably somewhere between the two - yet another shanty town for the sick, just one that swaps sky for stalactites. But if that's true, what about those murals and drawings you keep seeing? What about those mushrooms that seem more populous than the populace? Why does every map of the Bergmann tunnels tell you not to go into B2? Some questions are best left unanswered... but seek those answers anyway, if you dare.

Then, what about the characters? Well, unfortunately, they're one of the few things that sticks out as a negative for the game, even through my star-struck eyes. The levels may be carefully designed to a degree bordering pedantry, and the universe might have details going two hundred years back and two hundred years forwards, but the people that inhabit it are, like the shit tool shed your dad built in the backyard, wooden and rather quite flimsy. Mark, thankfully, is one of the best of the lot, though still not exactly great. Portrayed by veteran Hungarian voice actor Gabor Bakonyi, he isn't going to wisecrack like Duke, Lo Wang or Caleb, but he plays the sardonic, deadpan, tired, yet diligent worker well - but that's his peak, and even then, not every quip will land. Everything else, sadly, ranges from dull surprise, to severely understated shock, to a lack of emotion entirely. This isn't his fault necessarily, either, as the material he has to work with isn't particularly top tier. When one story revelation in particular that would leave most people shook to their core doesn't seem to elicit much more than an "oh no", there's only so much you can do to improve that. Also on the better side of characterisation, better than Mark by a long shot, are the characters you won't meet, but will hear a lot about through newspaper articles and audio tapes - mainly, Alex Hartman (James Miller) and Jeff Walter (John Cavanagh). Hartman, former head of Hammer Valley Hydro, is a man consumed by rage and a quest for vengeance after his company was bought up and subsequently ran into the ground by the Walter Corporation and its namesake CEO, who comes off as the Bob Page type, a habitual string-puller and wannabe usurper... or at least, Hartman believes so. These two figures are the driving force of the story, and make a damn good job out of it too.

Everyone else you meet is pretty much the bare minimum. Your boss, Paul, is the closest the game has to a secondary protagonist that's still alive. He's the one you'll be reporting to over the phone, but he serves no purpose other than to tell you where you're going next, and has no personality traits, or even anything remarkable about him, aside from some questions you may have at the end of your journey, which as of right now, are unanswered. Your other colleagues are even less of characters. Carla doesn't like you. Amit seems fond of you, but doesn't have anything else going for him. I don't think Steve even has any lines after the intro. You'll meet other folk too eventually, but none of them are even worth mentioning. The only exception to the dross is Robin, a man you'll read about often through your travels, and will meet in the unnamed coal-fired power station. His acting is easily the best-in-show, doing a great job at representing his dim-witted, comedic nature, and unlike anyone else in the game, you might actually genuinely enjoy his company instead of only tolerating it. There's also the matter of animations for these characters, which are rather lacking as well. The few times you actually interact with them face-to-face, they emote and propel themselves in stilted, robotic movements, and on a few occasions, I'd noticed their mouths weren't even moving at all. I'd argue that these instances are so few and far between that it doesn't really matter in the end, but considering the first thing you see after the menu screen is Paul and your other colleagues shuffling into shot, before sitting down and turning their heads mechanically, it certainly isn't the best first impression. I suspect Loiste knew this, too; every other occasion you meet up with another character, they're either seated, standing unnervingly still, or not even seen in the first place, only conversed with over radio and PA systems, which was probably the right call.

I've been trying my best, but I'm not sure my words and recollections alone can do this the justice it deserves. I think to really get my claws into what makes INFRA such an island unto its own and the wonderful experience that it is, I have to hone in on a certain part in particular and get right into the crux of things. To play on a term by four snipey socialists from Leeds, I need to find that rare essence. And I'm going to find it by going in-depth on Chapter 9, and in particular, my two favourite environments of not only the chapter, but the game altogether - the Turnip Hill Trainyard, and Turnip Hill itself. These two areas are linked to each other - by their obvious physical connection, by their similarities, and by their differences, to boot.

The trainyard is likely the single area in the entirety of INFRA that has the most personal appeal to me. It's a rather small level, too, but even one this compact still has many paths you can take through it, and this is but one of them. At this juncture in the game, it's dark out. You don't know the time, but it's been dark out for a while, so we're likely either coming up on midnight, or we've already passed into the early hours of the next morning. Heavy, grey clouds are rolling through the sky, only broken by the lights of lamp posts and the surrounding tenements. Turnip Hill rests to your right, but you're not going there just yet. The road ahead is cordoned off with a small barrier, of the sort that you'd see around road works; the wire from the street light continues off past it, and on a hunch, you follow. You pass under the bridge you drove in on, and that's when you see the yard come into view, the containers and the abandoned carriages... and that's when I saw it. The hangar. I had been vibing hard with this level from the get-go, but as soon as I saw that hangar, consisting primarily of shitty corrugated metal and rusted steel framing, I knew this was the place I was going to connect with on a deeper level than any other in the game. I digress - there's electricity going in, the outside lights are on, but the hangar doors don't budge. So you poke around the back, and sure enough, there's a ladder leaning on the wall, leading up to a hole in the wall, presumably where some sort of hatch would be placed. You ascend upwards, crawl through the hole, and you're in, on top of another smaller structure inside the hangar. This is where the level really sent my heart soaring.

Someone turned this little dinky hangar, in the middle of a disused trainyard, into their home. If you've lived near somewhere with a place like this, or somewhere with a set of detached garages, surely you've thought about how it'd be to live in one of them, right? I think about it a lot. Hell, maybe not living there, even, but just turning it into some kind of retreat of sorts. A drinking spot, or perhaps a band rehearsal space. There's definitely something of an allure to it, in our world, and in the game's world. There's a garage area at the hangar doors, with shelves, a workstation, barrels, containers, and some smaller machines. Right in the middle is the car that this part of the hangar is catered for, and it's a nice lil' car, too, not exactly a street racer or anything (at least on sight alone), but it looks capable enough. Directly in front of the structure, where you drop off to the floor, is a living space of sorts, outfitted with a sofa, table, rug, even a TV up on some shelves, with a games console to the side. There's a kitchen off to the opposite side, and it's got a fridge, a coffee machine, a microwave under the table, a portable stove; all things considered, all you really need, right? And then the structure you jumped from, ostensibly what would've been the hangar office and control room, has been converted into a bedroom area. There's a radiator next to the bed, and the tenant probably needs it, since those sheets making up the walls aren't going to be retaining much heat. It's trashy as fuck, there's refuse strewn all over the floor, you'll probably get tetanus if you scrape against the wall too much, but god damn it, maybe I'm just a freak - I could settle down here.

No time for that, though. Now you need to find your way out. You're not climbing back up onto the office, but when you look up, you notice a crane carrying some type of machine part. You head back into the office, spying the controls for the crane, and after a quick scan for missing fuses and some twiddling with the switches underneath, you eventually get it back into functional condition. Thirty seconds later, the crane smashes into the hangar doors, almost throwing them off their hinges, judging by the sound it makes. Time to retrace your steps and head to Turnip Hill. Now, back up at the barrier, you take the side path, head into the tenement, and after some banter with a self-styled "border guard", you're through the gates. Look up and around. Everything's covered in muck, garbage lines the patio more than the moss does, and half the lights aren't working. The damn thing wasn't even finished being built. No mincing words - it's a shithole. It's a den of iniquity. It's a slum. The complex is visibly falling apart. Places like this are where the idle rich send the disenfranchised, the distasteful and the dying, to get out of line-of-sight of their penthouse balconies, where everyone outside of their cliques can all rot down to the bone, for all they care. The poor sods. Nobody here deserves this, nobody here deserves to be here. This is the reaped harvest of leaving social housing to those who only care about lining their pockets. It's horrifying, and yet, at risk of sounding like a Common People-esque poverty tourist, it's got aura, personality, and it's an incredible space to run around in. You'll be spending a lot of time doing that too, as between unfulfilled plans and the failure of what was completed, to say nothing of its innate design, the place is a fucking maze. I'll stop here, so as to not spoil much else for you, because the Turnip Hill experience is something that is best seen with your own eyes.

However, with all I've said in praise of INFRA, I still have one last sticking point with it that I feel warrants mention, namely, the anticlimactic final chapter. Without delving into story details, our final destination finds us in the Black Rock Nuclear Power Plant, suffering under the demands of the city, if not the Stalburg Region as a whole, and waterlogged like Hurricane Sandy had passed through its halls. It looks the part for sure, as gorgeous as the rest of the game, its extensive compound promising adventure, with a smattering of early morning rain from the dark skies being the icing on the cake. It leaves an immediate, long-lasting first impression, but alas, the wheels start to come off after this. The chapter can be pretty well summed up in the phrase "unrealised potential". Despite the incredible amount of space the NPP inhabits, the actual playable area is sadly limited. Over two levels (not counting one that effectively serves a precursor to the game's epilogue), your roaming space is confined to three buildings, with only a few floors of the first two available in the first level, and the second taking place exclusively in one of the reactor buildings, albeit, again limited to just a few floors. There's a huge, flooded turbine hall in the second building, which is an impressive sight, and even though you only get to explore about half of it, it's probably still the highlight of the chapter. The action-puzzle climax of the game, in the second and last map of the chapter, doesn't fall entirely flat, but it tries its damn best to. The increasing complexity of the repairs up to this point is completely scuppered by a basic "find these parts and place them in these slots" approach, with the plant's manager almost babying you through it over a two-way transceiver. Then, in the final minutes, it all unsatisfyingly melts down into, depending on certain variables from throughout your journey, one of two minigames. Neither of them are outright bad, but they lack a suitable amount of tension for such a high stakes, life-or-death situation with the far-reaching repercussions that it has. It's an unfortunate misstep, a tumble at the finishing line, in an otherwise impeccably executed campaign.

Bringing us back to the plentiful positives, though, briefly touching on one of the most crucial parts of the package; the audio design is some first-rate stuff, especially in an engine not commonly renowned for it. Score-wise, what you get is perfectly capable, and at times, quite stunning. Composer Finnian Langham has turned in a pretty good effort, mixing and alternating soothing piano, strings and the occasional electronic beat, with lighter, synth-heavy ambience and darker, abrasive tones when appropriate, to mirror the lighter and darker spaces they inhabit so well. I may even go as far as to pinpoint hearing those tickled ivories for the first time in Hammer Valley as the exact moment I knew there was something special here. With that said, though, what I found more poignant, almost without fail, were the times that the score was absent entirely. It frees up the centre stage for the truly excellent sounds of the surrounds, be it the electrical hum of machinery and lights, or gusts of wind through the foliage, or occasionally, when an eerie scene demands it, absolutely nothing at all. The world of INFRA is at its most alive - or dead - at these moments. It roots you into the scenery, distant noises lead to tense head-turning moments, and from time to time, will even fool you into totally subjugating yourself to the paranoiac atmosphere, having to take off your headphones for a moment, to check where those indistinct reverberations are actually coming from.

It all comes together in a way that, in spite of the few mistakes it makes, is a completely enthralling ensemble. From beginning to end, it consumes you, you lose yourself in Loiste's universe, and everything outside of the game fades away. As ridiculous as the notion might seem at first, your brain really does become attuned to it, you start taking in the environments at the level the game asks of you, noticing all of Stalburg's perfectly placed little flaws, and the bigger ones become causes for real concern. In my time with it, even on my return visit for review purposes, I often found the hours flying past me in the real world, while my attention was fixed solely on taking Mark through these decrepit designs, and doing the best possible job of documenting each and every defect. The pacing is slow, but not torturously so - it's all put together so elegantly and precisely... that I have to drop the big "A" for it. I avoid it when I can because trotting it out is so god damn banal, everyone does it at one point or another, but fuck it - it's art. Like all of the best works, too, it's not perfect, but it inspires a true love in me anyway, blemishes and all. It's Stalker, it's slow cinema you can walk through; Tarkovsky in a graphics card.

Well, that's what it means in my eyes, at least. INFRA might mean something else to you when you play it. You could find it to be simply a fun little walking simulator. You might find it to be a cute tour of some pretty places. Maybe, you'll find it to be a remarkably boring, frustrating and aimless affair. As cliché as it is to express such a platitude, I can't speak for you. I can't speak for you, but I can speak for me, and to me, it's my dream game. As if someone had monitored and accumulated the visions my subconscious cooks up at night, those converging cogitations of concrete, catastrophe, conspiracy and collapse. Béton brut and corrugated metal. It's as if someone had siphoned that subliminal imagery from my head, and turned it into the video game equivalent of a full, Michelin-starred five-course meal. As if my fanciful, hazy night-time reveries took form all on their own.

They haven't, of course. What has happened is the small team at Loiste Interactive toiled away, laboured for years on a passion project, built in an increasingly senescent engine, on a product some would have called financially suicidal, and after all was said and done, put out a game that is, even if you agree with nothing else I say, at the very least, a unique experience that carves out a niche all to its own in a modern gaming landscape where the truly novel are few and far between. I don't expect everyone to agree with my sentiments, because I know the nature, the premise of this game isn't going to appeal to everyone. If you're more inclined to agree with them, however, perhaps you'll find it much the same as I have - a masterclass in constructing a real, genuine, lifelike world, one that has been lived in before the player, and will continue to be lived in after the player. I think if you're not going to like INFRA, you'll probably know you're not going to like it, and I doubt I could say anything to change your mind. If you find your interest piqued by it, though, then it's got the most glowing plaudits and recommendations that I can give. I treasure my time spent with INFRA highly, and I hope, much in the same vein, that others will treasure their time with it too.