Eurojank in the best possible way, Infra has some truly unique ideas. Its puzzles are all set in the context of the real world - repairing switch boxes, setting up a water treatment plant, and other engineering problems are seamlessly integrated into the levels. A pretty interesting backstory of corporate corruption and greed underlies these puzzles, though it's perhaps a bit overwritten near its end. It also commits the dire sin of being about 2 hours too long.

Still, I haven't played anything like this before and probably won't again. Despite my minor complaints, you can tell the developers really gave a shit about putting something new into the world. Glad the Euros still have their magic Source engine touch.

the most finnish eurojank source adventure game i think i've ever played (positive). even if the puzzles feel like kind of a slog at times, and the battery drain mechanic is kind of just an annoyance (luckily, you can edit the configs to decrease the rate that it drains, or just turn it off completely), every environment has an endless amount of care put into it and the photography helps to incentivize you to explore every little crevice you can, find every document and easter egg.

i do wish it was made a bit more obvious at times which path leads you to the next area and which is optional, because there are multiple times where i'll walk into a hallway thinking it's more map only to be met with a level transition. still, i'll definitely replay this at some point, maybe check out the surprising wealth of fan-mods too. i like this game quite a bit, even through the tedium.

I want to preface what I'm about to say with the fact that if you like puzzle games where you must entirely find the solution yourself without any hints then this is the game for you. There's more than enough of that to spend hours on.

With that being said, those of you who are like me and want some semblance of (video game) logic toward a conclusion in puzzles, Infra is a test of frustration. For the handful of hours I got through this, every puzzle I found was met with a sense of dread and calling it quits for the day.

The way puzzles are structured are fairly straightforward. You walk into a location, are met with infrastructure that's in serious disrepair, and need to fix it to progress. That's all the guidance you get outside of the odd note here and there. As such, puzzles are less about finding the correct solution and more about finding whatever it is the game wants. To me, that process is grating and makes me feel like I'm walking in circles finding that one thing I didn't interact with.

I completely understand why the developer did this. They wanted Infra's puzzles to feel as realistic as possible, at least within the ability to actually complete them. On the front of uniqueness, there's few games with puzzles quite like it. It's just not for me and, judging by the fact 35% of people have gotten just under halfway through the game, it's not for a lot of people.

Though outside of things that could arguably come down to personal tastes, the voice acting for this game is laughably bad. It's mostly due to Finnish voice actors not speaking their native language which isn't the fault of the actors themselves, but it does make any line delivered feel unnaturally wooden. I almost considered swapping the language at times and just reading the subtitles, which is tough since I tend to have a tough time putting subtitles to emotion.

For what it's worth, there are things Infra gets right. Its world is gorgeous and arguably some of the best Source 1 content we've ever gotten. It also has decent music whenever it interjects. For my tastes though, it isn't enough to carry the experience. I really wish I could love this game as much as other people do, but the only way I see myself playing without losing my sanity is to look up all the puzzle solutions. Not super interested in that idea.

Here is my review of Infra AKA Level Design: The Official Game of the Movie

If you love to explore meticulously recreated virtual renditions of civil infrastructure, industrial facilities, and other man-made utilitarian spaces, with a few caves thrown in for good measure, then BOY have I got the game for you. You are a Finnish Structural Analyst tasked with investigating the deteriorating facilities at a hydroelectric dam in a fictional Scandinavian city called Stalburg. Things spiral into the dark from there. Those facilities, they sure are deteriorating something fierce! Time to photograph all the broken parts while solving puzzles, fixing utility systems, and trying not to drown, fall, get crushed, electrocuted, burned, poisoned, or blown up! And what is this? A far reaching industrial conspiracy? Just how run down IS this city, and how'd it get this bad? And what's going on with this Open Sewer place I keep hearing about? And what's with all these beers and mushrooms? Well.... at least I Have Five Batteries for the Flashlight Now...

Let me tell you, this game GOES places. Like the deterioration of Stalburg's civic infrastructure, it is far larger and more extensively detailed than it seems at first glance, but for the most part it uses that time very well. It is jam-packed with secrets and weird level-design jokes, and weird one-off bespoke systems. There is some truly wild deep lore that rivals dark souls in its hiddenness and depth of its story implications. No really. It has some charmingly rough voice acting and some really spectacular atmosphere. The level design creates this eerie feeling of isolation and lostness and I-shouldn't-be-here-ness that makes you believe that at any time, it could turn into a horror game. And well, it kind of is a horror game, but the monster is government corruption, neglect, and neoliberal austerity measures.

You WILL learn how a civic water filtration facility works and you WILL have a great time doing it.

Infra is a very special game that was clearly made with a ton of love, and if any of the above sounds good to you, you owe it to yourself to play it.

To put it simply, one of the most unique and soulful experiences in the whole medium. It's lengthy, deep, intriguing and has a very strong devotion to immersion. This game really isn't about it's mechanics, it's about the insanely believable and memorable world it creates and how you can uncover it's many secrets by being curious and attentive. At times it's humorous, other times its creepy or just plain weird and everything in between. A fantastic walking sim.

Unfortunately, it is a game for a niche audience since it really does require a lot of patience and an eye for detail or being interested to some extent in city infrastructure. It's a game especially made for those that want to get lost in a unique world that's under the mask of a normal contemporary setting and don't mind spending time simply observing and figuring stuff out, probably the best urban exploration game out there too.

If you have the patience and the curiosity, don't skip this one!

Never in my life would I have expected a game about infrastructure to be so good. It casually handles so many things expertly, which most games fail to do. Firstly, how to make urban environments interesting. How many sewers have you been crawling through, how many caves explored, industrial plants traversed, and now you realize how well and interesting these locations could have been instead of running through them in seconds. Even the actual street sections which are rather short show so much intricacy you would never find in another game.

The second point are the mostly optional puzzles, which are my favorite type - getting somewhat complicated and old machines running again. It feels so good. It even sets up the more absurd parts well. And the sheer length and amount of locations are admirable.

Absolutely incredible how someone who, as I understand it, is mostly interested in engineering can not only make a game with those parts interesting, but make one of the best adventures to date almost in passing. Great work, there's nothing like it. Masterpiece.

god, i wish i could finish this game. it seems like the dream! an urban exploration game about crumbling infrastructure tinged with conspiracy or maybe just urban politics and threaded with some light puzzling.

well, the puzzles weren't so light. i hit the PIPE ROOM and realized that, like, .... oh. this is one of those serious Logic Puzzle games, not one of those "pull this lever, haha you did it, good job" puzzle games. which is too bad, because as we have well established in Potato Lore by now i am tired and impatient all of the time.

It's a nice game, I actually started playing it with great interest. But turns out this game is created to spite me: a linear puzzle game with a lot of the puzzles and content being skippable. I guess it would be alright if I had a counter or something that told me if I am missing stuff but no, most of this stuff is either designed to make you play the game multiple times or straight up force you to use a guide.
I don't like that you cannot revise your discoveries, your items, etc. Specially so that I can keep up with the lore more effectively.
The battery mechanic was also totally unnecessary imo.

Other than that it's a cool and well made setting so far, and I like the idea of fixing everything you find

um jogo massivo, cheio de coisas pra explorar e sentir. ele traz uma sensação constante de que você bugou e agora tá em uma área vazia que não era pra você estar. eu, apaixonada pelos gráficos de half life 2 e portal, me deleitei nessa jogatina cheia de indução de nostalgia pelas paisagens.

por mais que seja extremamente longo e cansativo e pedante e a historia seja beeeem ok mas soe muito que tá ali só pra ter algo, eu não me arrependi de ter jogado em nenhum momento! a gameplay é boa e os puzzles são legais e inteligentezinhos e é muito divertido o sistema de fotos :)

talvez eu até rejogue depois, achei muito interessante!

Honestly, Genuinely, this is my dream game, and I will continue to shill it for as long as I draw breath. Playing Half Life 2 from a young age gave me specific brain worms about two things: Exploring dilapidated European urban/industrial environments and the vibe of the Source Engine. This game features both of these things in their most extreme. It's all about exploring environments of the aforementioned type, photographing structural damage and finding notes that gradually drip-feed you the surprisingly large scope of the story.

Being released in parts means the story of this thing is surprisingly long and in-depth, with huge, beautifully crafted environments that really just ooze the "Urbexing in cool old places" vibe. Things start off as just you trying to get through the fucking deathtrap places you've been sent into, and escalates into the most insane climax a walking simulator about being a structural analyst ever could.

The sheer amount of hidden stuff you can just stumble across or completely miss makes this game so compelling for multiple playthroughs. My first few times playing through the early part of this game, I missed one of the darkest, most unnerving possible things lying around in an otherwise innocuous place, complete with missable dialogue and all.

Speaking of dialogue, the protagonist is just voiced by Some Dude with a mic of questionable quality, but his remarks and reactions to all the nonsense he eventually goes through went on to endear me towards him way more than I ever expected.

Also, this game features some pretty in-depth puzzles revolving around the various places you visit. Don't let that turn you off if you're not big-brained, though, since they're implemented in a way i'm not sure I've ever seen done before. Since your actual job is just to get in there, take pictures, and get out, the puzzles are designed such that you don't actually need to "solve" them and fix the problem in order to progress. To illustrate, an example of this is the water pumping station early on. To progress, you need to either get a key from one of the pools, or just shut the whole place off and leave via a pipe. However, you could choose to stick around, grab the key, and then reconfigure the whole system to run correctly. Not only is this immensely satisfying, but it has impacts on your playthrough further down the road, in the state of the world reflecting your choice to break the puzzle, leave it as is, or leave it better than you found it. This also plays into the game's multiple endings, giving this game a frankly shocking degree of scale, scope and replayability for a relatively obscure indie title.

Unironically, this game sold me on the concept of a "walking simulator", and I would buy copies of it for everyone I know if I had the money to throw around. If you like Source Engine environments at all, please give this game a shot, it deserves the world.

ENG: Being a game made in Source, the setting and scenery are incredible, the main mechanic of taking pictures is fine but that's as far as it goes... and it has little else to offer. The story, having potential, is wasted by the uninteresting way it's told and the puzzles are some of the most boring I've ever seen in my life. I'm not a fan of them, preferring games that innovate in that aspect (Superliminal or Return of the Obra Dinn), but I fell asleep.

ESP: Al ser un juego hecho en Source, la ambientación y escenarios son increíbles, la mecánica principal de sacar fotos está bien pero hasta ahí... y poco más tiene para ofrecer. La historia, teniendo potencial, se desperdicia por la forma poco interesante que se cuenta y los puzzles son de lo más aburrido que vi en mi vida. Está bien que ya de por sí no soy un fanatico de ellos, prefiriendo juegos que innoven en ese aspecto (Superliminal o Return of the Obra Dinn) pero posta que me dormí.

I've written about Infra before, and I still stand by everything I said there, but I wanted to go more into depth about why in particular this really impacted me out of everything I played this year.

I played a lot of extremely video-gamey games this year. I ground through Vampire Survivors, I relearned how much I fucking love pinball, I attempted to catch up on Destiny 2 and eventually gave up when PlayStation fucked them, and I played a bunch of AAA and point and click games with my girlfriends.

But Infra is the game which really captured my brain in a way that fundamentally changed my opinion of what I want out of games. Infra made me feel comfortable cheating through Alan Wake's sloggish combat. It reminded me how much I fucking love adventure games. It reminded me how my least favorite part of Amnesia games was the fucking monsters. And it showed me a type of game I never thought could be played straight: The infrastructure thriller.

Anybody familiar with the late-00s era of gaming is probably familiar with Viscera Cleanup Detail, and infrastructure thrillers have been sort of caught in a twee physics-comedy era ever since. Infrastructure, something that is vitally important to real spaces and generally only scenery in video games, is usually treated as an avenue for comedy in games. Space is never given a sense of vibrancy, reality, and depth, for the sake of life. It's all for fun gags about physics objects bouncing around, or to add tension to guys shooting at you, or to make two sweaty men look even grosser as they climb out of a dumpster.

But Infra is so confident, so made with love, and dedicated to putting you squarely in the shoes of a site inspector for a city architecture firm. You certainly go above and beyond the call of duty, eventually scrambling through a dam, a bunker, and a nuclear plant, but none of this is with the tension of guns or aliens or "enemies" beyond incompetent politicians and corrupt business mogals. And it's a deeply funny game at times. There's reasons I've been caught shitchosting about Infra multiple times here.

And most of all, this is perhaps the only true liminal game I've played. Backrooms content has exploded in popularity lately as an extension of analog horror, and all of it is basically mediocre at best. The best Backrooms game of 2023 was My House (.wad), and literally not a single "Backrooms" game I played featuring the titular title was any good at all. (I also played Anemoiapolis this year, and it was quite good, but not as good as Infra.) But the best liminal game I've played is Infra.

"Liminal" does not mean "scary empty place". Liminal refers to spaces whose purpose is transient - people are meant to travel through them, but not stay in them. You're not meant to pay attention to them. And Infra makes you not only look at these spaces, and pay attention to them - it requires you to care about them. It wants you to look at the wounds on the walls, see where the bones are cracking, listen to where the ventilation wheezes. It understands that liminal is not inherently scary - it's definitely alien, but it's also a part of life. It's quiet, and a little lonely, and a little beautiful in its own way.

And yeah, the first two acts of the game have some bad gameplay. Please, please, endure the raft ride if you generally like video games. I promise it gets better. The computers we've built can make spaces like this feel real. They can make you think about the cities we live in as breathing, real places, with all the guts and back rooms as actual places. I need more games like this. I crave it.

Infra is exactly what I didn't expect, an exploration game that isn't just a walking simulator. You go through a lot of places, all fairly different from each other and also all of them are extremely atmospheric. I think they did it on purpose to make the various levels seem like they're devoid of life but at the same time there's always an impending danger that could pop up at any time (and maybe it just might?). My only complaint is that sometimes the puzzles are extremely obtuse in ways you also don't expect but it's nothing that can't be solved by looking it up. I wouldn't really call it euro jank because there's really not much jank to it, but it's definitely a fairly good game with some very weird stuff. The humour is pretty hilarious at times and genuinely brings the game up a notch for me.

This is probably my favorite recent imperfect game.

I think it's really cool that there's like, a very granular infrastructure focused game like this. It does a lot of good adventure gamey stuff while also avoiding doing weird inventory puzzles. It's also definitely a eurojank game, full of eastern europe cultural artifacts and odd design decisions which might seem weird and counterintuitive. It's like the machine fixing puzzles of Myst mixed with the "carry this object" puzzles of Amnesia and the environmental design of a walking sim. There's no enemies, this is an adventure game through and through!

The only thing weird about it is how it gets better designed as it goes. There's this awful horrible raft ride in act one which is the WORST part of the game, it's so awful i couldn't blame anybody for dropping the game there. I had to noclip to get myself out of some spots in act 2. But then in the last act of the game there's a REALLY good boat scene, and the contrast is kinda jarring! But also, kind of inspiring! You get to see developers hone their craft while you're playing the same game!

It's honestly really cool that a game can be this big and epic and expansive and never really veer into science fiction or fantasy too hard. The most unreal aspect of the game setting is these radioactive mushrooms growing in places, but beyond that everything is very real and grounded. And i think that's pretty impressive to me since video games are usually a medium so based in fantasy!

This game is as big as Half-Life 2, and in the same engine and has:
- No combat
- No enemies
- No scince fiction
- No aliens

And still works really well! And that's really impressive.

The only recommendation I would make is going into the settings and modifying the flashlight and camera batteries to just make them never run out. That mechanic feels wholly unnecessary to the flavour of the game, often more frustrating than interesting, and removing the tension of trying to find batteries really lets the walking sim parts shine. The developers seem to have realized this over its long development history, as in the final act you're given an upgraded flashlight which doesn't have the same battery drain issues.

If it weren't for the weird quirks, the awful Act 1 design problems, and the battery mechanics, this would easily be five stars. But it's already basically an instant recommend. Mark Infra goes down in my brain as one of my favorite scrimblos. Good job folks, this game is a winner.