Karma. Incarnation 1 Reviews

Going through steam on a Saturday, looking at what's for sale, and I find this little colorful point an click game, with a very strange name, for less than $2. I had never seen it before, never heard of it before, so I thought "why not" and got the game and started playing it. I had only wanted to spend an hour on it, but it ended up taking over the rest of my day. The sound was a little strange at first, but it ended up fitting the game well, for it is a strange game. The art was phenominal, and absolutely outstanding. The monsters looked nightmarish and grotesque, but at the same time rather beautiful. The puzzles were a moderate challenge, and the story had so much depth for never using words. The characters personalities felt like actual people, even if they are just happy little creatures interacting around you.. I wished the astral sight could have been required more, and that the radius was bigger, or that it could be moved around. Sometimes it took a while for the main character to trudge from one side of the screen to the other, othertimes it would refuse to move and I'd have to restart the game, but thankfully it has a save system. Overall, absolutely enjoyed it. :D

I'll spare me and you a lengthy review as others have done this already. While sifting through the garbage that swamps Steam I came across this game and was immediately intrigued by the screenshots. I didn't expect much aside from nice graphics. After playing my first hour I have to say that this is one of the very rare cases where the intrinsic value of the offer is much higher than the asking price. Although it's technically a point and clicker the game has not much in common with traditional titles in the genre. Visual art and music are top notch and original as is the hint system and the method of story telling. If you dare to veer off the well trodden path this game is a no-brainer. I play it in 4k on Win10_64 without problems. AuraLab has created a gem of a game and Karma. Incarnation 1 is well worth your time and the few petty cents they ask for the privilege of playing this piece of art. I give it a 9/10 for nearly perfect enjoyment.

This is a fun adventure game with psychedelic overtones. I think this is the most unusual and unique game I ever played. It's atmospheric, weird in a good way and has nice puzzles some of which are rather complex. Great art and great soundtrack. If you want a trip into something strange and unusual, this game is your ticket.

I loved it. It's fun, the graphics are nice and colorful. 10/10

A delightful little game! Very beautiful and unique artstyle, with lush colourful environments, cute characters, and a sweet if simple storyline. The "puzzles" are pretty easy to solve so there's not much of a challenge, however the main draw of the game is simply exploring this creative and imaginative world. A lot of times I found myself clicking on objects over and over again just to see the funny animations! And there's a decent amount of content available, considering the game easily lasts around 2 hours (without counting achievement hunting). The style reminded me a lot of Botanicula and other Amanita Design's games, though obviously less complex than that. Still, for such a cheap price it's definitely a more than satisfying experience. I bought this on impulse and I don't regret it one bit!

The beauty of the art style is evident to anyone, so I will not dwell on that. While it is impossible to not be reminded of the Amanita Design games, this doesn't feel like a rip-off. And while the textures are not as polished, the flow of movement from the characters is lovely and particularly well done. And the music score is great as well. Some mechanics (like being good and evil) could have been implemented better, the save system is far from good, autosaves and lets you replay huge chunks of the game if you want to try out handling affairs differently. Also it should be mentioned that this is part 1 of the story. All in all I had a blast playing it. If the pictures and trailer get you, you probably will not be disappointed.

To tell the truth, I was not impressed by the demo and did not expect much from this game, but it turned out to be quite a little masterpiece! 'Karma' is beautiful, stylish and fun 'Samorost'-like puzzle adventure game. Jolly little monsters live in a bizarre world not unlike those made by Amanita, but with its own flavor - and many puzzles that could be somewhat difficult to solve without the walkthrough because of their, well, somewhat illogical nature. But it is very funny indeed - and every little bug, moth or flower is drawn and animated with special care and love. And after the recent huge price-drop, this game is actually a must-buy!

This game has a lot of promise, then wastes it. The graphics are trippy and cool, and the game-play starts to set up some intriguing puzzles. But then the game has the feel like the creators got tired and quit early. Lots of good stuff is set up, then it either is dropped, or it doesn't have any kind of satisfying resolution. Seriously -- if you're going to make a game like this, have a plan to finish it. The game is seriously unfinished. There is no indication the game designers have a plan to come back and fill in the stuff that's unfinished. It's like they took the money and ran. Really lame. Others have compared this to Botanicula, but that's unfair to Botanicula, because the studio that made Botatinucla actually cared enough to finish what they started.

There's a lot about this game that is truly [b][i]bizarre[/i][/b], not just the art style. The game seems to be cobbled together without much care for the player's experience, and the result was that I was frustrated with gameplay, felt like I was fighting the game to play it, and felt like the game did not respect my time. (The ~7hours I've logged in it are only because I'm an unrelenting achievement whore.) This made it difficult to enjoy the game, and so I don't recommend Incarnation 1 -- though I am hoping the dev might tweak things for later chapters, and am eager to see where all this goes. [EDIT Oct 10 2019: So many people praising the game as "art." Graphics aren't gameplay.] A few examples of why I found Incarnation 1 a chore to play: 1) Within the first ~10-15 mins of gameplay *after* the intro, you'll encounter a truly frenetic and bewildering sequence of load screens (!?) and short vignettes where there is little meaningful gameplay. [spoiler](I'm thinking especially of the first time you get into that weird little living elevator that lets you travel to different areas. You're forced through a vignette in which you have an interaction -with no options-- with a blind character. You never see that character ever again, and you pass through a few areas of the game you never see again. if this is foreshadowing for a later episode of the game, it comes at the expense of enjoying this chapter.)[/spoiler] It's exceptionally difficult to start feeling at home in the world of Karma when, right at the start, gameplay is constantly being interrupted. 2) You've got an inventory that displays items you've collected. However, you have no ability select items from your inventory to do anything with them. You can look at them in your inventory, but you learn nothing new by looking at them, and clicking anything in the inventory is never a path to accomplish anything in the game. If you've got the right item in your inventory, then when you approach the place where it can be used, the game will just tell you to use the item. And you then use it without actually accessing the inventory at all. This turns the familiar presence of an inventory into a distraction with no relevance to gameplay, and sends mixed signals to the player about how they are supposed to accomplish anything in the game. 3) Using Astral Sight appears to be just a gimmick for introducing (more) psychedelic art. There's very little going on in the spirit world that seems to matter for gameplay. Moreover, Astral Sight helps bring out some weird design decisions about the mechanics. Normally (without Astral Sight) you can pan around the whole screen and see what's going on far away from you. But Astral Sight only works for a small window around your character, so your world shrinks a bit when you use it (presumably the exact opposite of the experience it was supposed to provide of transcending a more mundane plane of existence or whatever). And yet, it's not quite so jarring, because... 4) The world you can see (without Astral Sight) is decoupled from the world you can interact with, nearly all the time. You can always pan around a screen and see what's far away from you, but you've typically got no option to interact with anything until you walk right up to an object. (The one exception is [spoiler]the forest[/spoiler], the one screen/area where suddenly, you can interact with objects at a distance. If you're like me, you discover this by being lost and bored and clicking anything you can -- and most of what you can click at a distance is irrelevant. The whole experience is a bit confounding.) When you are close to objects, the game simply tells you how you interact with them. As a result, being able to look around the whole screen at any time is basically meaningless for gameplay, since you only get information about which parts of the world are relevant once you've walked up to them. 5) Many of the hand-drawn animations become more irritating than charming, real quick. [spoiler]Especially in the forest and the leaf-maze.[/spoiler] The same animation plays every time you perform an action, and just eats up time: cute the first time, maddening the 30th time. Also anytime you are traveling to the left and click to interact with anything to your left, your character will pause, turn to the right, then turn back to the left and do what you wanted. This just seems like lazy programming.

Karma Incarnation 1 is one third of a cutely psychedelic point and click adventure with light puzzling and some hidden objects. I played it entirely using touch screen controls, though at the start of the game some baffling keyboard/mouse controls were communicated to me without any dialogue. I ignored this and kept touching things intuitively on the screen, which seemed to work just fine. In the first 40 minutes I met a guru, dosed my eyeballs with a psychotropic substance that let me see spirits and a new world of colour, then I jumped inside some kind of travel monster that took a blind man to eye-land, and then went to a beach rave with a flying saucer. The only puzzle I found tedious was jumping through holes in a leaf to try to find the correct exit, but otherwise most things went smoothly without requiring trial and error or repetitive searching. I can't wait to see the other two thirds of the game...