Karma. Incarnation 1

My first impression of Karma. Incarnation 1 was the kind of gut reaction I rarely get from a small studio's debut: the screen fills with colour so dense and strange that you forget to click anything. AuraLab are a Russian indie team, and this is their love letter to the psychedelic end of the Amanita Design lineage, think Machinarium crossed with something drawn in a late-night sketchbook after one too many cups of mushroom tea. Every background is hand-drawn and vividly alive, every creature animated with its own little vocabulary of gesture. The protagonist, Pip, is a bloated worm-soul who wanted to be a dragon and got stuck with the consolation prize of a big mouth and no limbs. The premise is as cosmic as it sounds: your soul-mate gets eaten by a giant flaming space slug, you reincarnate wrong, and now you have to traverse a ruined spirit world to bring the lovers back together. Nobody speaks a word. Dialogue plays out in thought bubbles and pictograms, and the soundtrack, composed by ZMEIRADUGA, shifts from tribal percussion to ambient cave-drip depending on which zone you wander into. I find that kind of intentional soundscaping genuinely moving. On the mechanical side, Karma. Incarnation 1 is a very gentle point-and-click. Pip travels through roughly seven or eight distinct environments, each acting as its own puzzle chapter. Crucially, the game skips the genre's usual irritations: no pixel-hunting for tiny objects, no impenetrable inventory juggling. If something matters, a large icon flags it. The trade-off is that the puzzles rarely bite back. Early zones are creative, there is a drum-rhythm sequence in an ice area where you have to play in time with other characters to thaw out a frozen creature, and it lands beautifully because it weaves the soundtrack directly into the gameplay. Later, though, the design leans on fetch-quest chains and the logic gets muddier. The forest section in particular attracted criticism across the board for devolving into clicking objects at random until something progresses. That is a fair knock. The karma system is the other big talking point. Every quest offers at least two routes: a patient, cooperative path or a swallow-the-character-whole shortcut. Evil deeds sprout horns and spikes from Pip's body, visually warping him, and other creatures respond to his appearance differently. Committing too many sins locks off the good ending without any explicit warning, which catches players off-guard on a first run and can feel arbitrary rather than meaningful. The Astral Sight ability, press a button to reveal the spirit world layer with its funky extra colours and hidden passages, is genuinely evocative but underused. Several zones barely require it at all, which is a wasted opportunity given how beautiful the effect looks. The pace is where opinions genuinely split. Every action in this game triggers a hand-drawn animation, and there is no skip button. Pip turns, shrugs, swallows, reacts, and each of those moments plays at its own leisurely tempo. Critics who bounced off it cite the slowness as the defining flaw. I understand that reaction, but I want to push back slightly: the animations are what the whole thing is built on, and treating them as something to hurry through misses the point. Where the pacing does become a genuine problem is in the back half, when you are stuck repeating a slow traversal route because a puzzle is unclear. A speed toggle would have cost nothing and solved everything. Completionists chasing the good ending will need a second run lasting roughly two to five hours total, depending on patience.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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