“Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to be here when it does. If there’s one thing I’m sure of; everything’s about to fall apart”.

A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.

INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.

Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.

I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.

Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.

While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.

INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.