Culture
The 'Half-Life 2' of Infrastructure Video Games Is Out, And It's Weird
Are you enough of a hero to document grievous safety violations in a crumbling Baltic city?
Take the brooding beauty and dystopian, Soviet-flavored setting of “Half-Life 2”—but remove the weapons and monsters—and you got yourself “INFRA,” a video game about fixing a crumbling city before everything goes to hell.
The first-person nonshooter will not appeal to everyone. The action begins in, of all places, a boardroom discussion—a narrative decision the game seems to instantly regret, because you get a pop-up option to “Skip meeting.” “Look, just text me the memos, I want this over with as soon as possible,” your character growls. Yet you might spend the next 7 minutes trying to find the dang exit of your office building, as did a guy who recorded the below play-through video. (He then fell off a ledge and died.)