Ad Infinitum

My first hour with Ad Infinitum had me genuinely impressed by how confidently it sets its stage. You step into the boots of Paul von Schmidt, a young German soldier whose grip on reality is fraying badly after the Great War, and the game immediately commits to splitting your time between two locations that feel like polar opposites: a decaying family mansion full of scattered letters and creeping dread, and the nightmare-warped trenches of No Man's Land where grotesque creatures hunt you in the dark. That dual structure is the game's best idea, and when both halves are working in sync, it produces something genuinely unsettling. The trench sections are where Ad Infinitum earns most of its goodwill. Each of the game's four chapters sends you back into the mud to face a different creature with its own rules. One boss - a flaming centaur-like monster called Rage - has to be lured into a munitions depot to destroy it. Another, a four-armed mechanically-grafted horror named Corruption, offers a genuine moral fork: kill it with toxic gas or sedate it and let it disappear, a choice that feeds into the multiple endings. Then there are the slow-moving mannequins that freeze when your flashlight hits them, forcing you to manage a wind-up torch with limited charge while inching forward. These moments are inventive, and the creature design across the board is the single thing Ad Infinitum does better than most of its peers. The sound design matches it - ambient audio builds pressure without relying on cheap jump scares, and the score noticeably shifts gear the moment something starts hunting you. The mansion chapters are the weaker half of that equation. They function as slower, note-gathering interludes between trench runs, with light puzzles and an ever-shifting layout that keeps things from going completely stale. The problem is that the haunted-house atmosphere here is clearly inspired by stronger titles, and while the letters scattered around the Von Schmitt estate do solid worldbuilding work - filling in a tragic family portrait of pride, grief, and the particular cruelty WWI inflicted on civilians - the pacing drags. Objectives can be unclear enough to leave you circling rooms without purpose, and at launch several players hit bugs where critical prompts simply failed to appear, requiring a full restart to unstick. Framerate dips and audio glitches compounded those issues. Whether patches have fully addressed all of them is a reasonable thing to check before committing. Narratively, Ad Infinitum is more admirable in intent than execution. The war-as-psychological-horror framing is genuinely thoughtful - each boss creature represents a repressed trauma, and the binary choices tied to those encounters gesture toward moral weight. But the story rarely digs as deep as the premise promises, delivering surface-level examinations of PTSD and family damage where it could have been devastating. The English voice acting is also uneven enough that switching to the German audio track, if you are comfortable reading subtitles, is the better call. The whole experience runs around six to eight hours, which keeps it from outstaying its welcome but also means there is not much room to course-correct when a chapter misfires. There is no chapter select, so seeing alternate endings means replaying the entire game. For players who want atmosphere, distinctive creature encounters, and a WW1 setting that no other genre is really using this way, Ad Infinitum has a specific appeal that is real and worth acknowledging. Come in expecting the mechanical depth of Amnesia or the narrative craft of Soma and you will leave a little cold. Come in wanting a genuinely creepy six-hour ride with standout creature design and a story that, despite its flaws, actually sticks a landing worth seeing - and you will probably find it worth the time.

Alex · Scout Team

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