Infliction: Extended Cut PlayStation 5 Review

Infliction: Extended Cut is a nightmarish experience perfect for horror fans. A dreadful and often uneasy adventure teeming with unsettling moments as you piece together a once-happy family who suffered a horrible fate. Navigating the environment can be vexing as information is provided of what to do and there's no run option. This limited mobility and lack of defense does create a perfect storm for this type of experience but can also lead to moments of annoyance as you attempt to avoid death. The story itself requires a great deal of detective work as you'll need all the collectibles to understand what's going on. Those who are willing to take the time will find a horror experience will leave you afraid of the dark.

Infliction: Extended Cut has you returning home to search for your wife's plane ticket. When inside you find the home is empty and an unsettling atmosphere starts to set in. As you venture deeper into the home sudden supernatural occurrences start to happen as you now have to evade a dark entity that chases you and reality itself starts to change. All while piecing together what actually happened through collectables found throughout the environment.

This way of storytelling can go both ways. On one hand, it encourages you to explore the area but it can lead to frustrating moments as not having the full set of memories can leave holes within the picture. Simply rushing through the game will leave you confused and by the end, you'll be left wondering what exactly happened. Especially since locating these optional items requires a great deal of patience.

Similar to Outlast you're given limited mobility options and no way of defense. All you can do is move forward, hide, and attempt to figure out what to do next. The game provides an objective but little navigation in the way of a camera. Finding your way forward requires a bit of trial and error but eventually you get used to the system. There's plenty of objects to interact with and some provide memories that give insight into what happened. This can become frustrating as there's plenty you can interact with and more than half the objects being pointless. Sometimes it's just to move an object a few inches and other times it's just some random item with no use. What adds to the tension is the entity.

This supernatural figure is seen throughout and hunts the player. It's not all dynamic but the tension that it can pop out of nowhere is constant. Adding to the thrill and fear is the continuous shifts in the environment. Changing layouts, objects disappearing and appearing, and other oddities happen regularly. The developers took this a step forward by requiring the entity to seemingly kill the player but this isn't always the case. 

Infliction does borrow heavily from Hideo Kojima's PT. Fans of the acclaimed demo of the canceled reboot of Silent Hill can be seen throughout this title. Even the primary entity named Sarah acts and looks like Lisa. This isn't a bad thing as the developers did a great job recapturing that anxiety with this title. The visuals are not of similar quality to the acclaimed demo but the developers did a great job creating a sense of dread with little assets.

Adding to the pressure is the incredible use of sound and light. The developers barrage the player with unsettling sounds that capture that feeling of uneasiness of being alone. Every little click and step making the player feel like something is stalking them is perfectly captured here. With the lack of music working to the game's advantage. The only defense is the light and the only tool you can depend on being a camera.

With the extended cut, players can replay the game with harder options. This includes remixed puzzles, ghost spawning faster and moving quicker, an additional ending, and a cut content museum. It offers more reason to play through the game, which can be completed in around 3 hours.

Infliction: Extended Cut offers a stress-filled adventure as you try to evade demonic creatures. The navigation and excessive interactive items issues aside Infliction: Extended Cut is terrifying. There's plenty of moments where you'll feel cold chills rush through your spine as you walk down each hallway wondering what's on the other side and too afraid to look behind you. You'll need to take chances when exploring to find out what happened truly and often that means dealing with the vexing mobility system. Despite this Infliction is a terrifying adventure that will keep you from walking into dark places for a long time.
 

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed
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