Video Game / INFRA

Corruption runs deep in Stalburg.

Infra is an atmospheric first-person adventure/exploration/puzzle game by Loiste Interactive, the first part of which was released in January 2016. The game sees the player character, Mark, sent to investigate the state of the rusting and neglected infrastructure in the fictional Baltic city of Stalburg. However, this routine assignment soon turns into a fight for survival as Mark is faced with collapsing tunnels, broken machinery and a conspiracy from the past that threatens the entire city. It features a game world with very high attention to detail, and well researched infrastructure designed to resemble the real thing. Rather than relying on fantasy or science-fiction elements, or having any combat, the game's main sources of danger and puzzles are the city's own tunnels and machines.

Originally released in three parts on Steam, with each subsequent part being available for free to owners of the previous parts.

A DLC expansion taking place six months after the game, Whiprock, has been announced, alongside two other titles sharing the same universe — Open Sewer, a Western RPG currently in early access, taking place in Stalburg's Obenseuer slums, and VALTA, a Real-Time Strategy game currently in early development, set 200 years after the events of INFRA.

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INFRA contains examples of the following tropes:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Usually averted in that you're forced to crouch and crawl through passages, but the overall size of the tunnel system is vast.
• Air-Vent Passageway
• Always a Bigger Fish: The reason why Alex Hartman starts his personal revenge against Jeff Walter. Walter's company was just a front for a shadow government group.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • You find dozens of documents and tapes about the city's collapsing infrastructure.
  • Your own phone calls and photographs, if you don't make it back out, giving a record of your literal descent into danger.
  • A written record of something behind a particular door, in a secret area.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: There is a secret group called the "Raven Research Institute", which investigates corruption in the city of Stalburg, and in particular Stalburg Nuclear Weapons' illegal weapons trading schemes and their efforts to cover these up, which among other things had led them to murder the survivors of the metro train wreck. It is revealed that the player character's boss, Paul Lauwens, has a secret agreement to provide them with information, but the company's servers had been hacked, leading to the loss of data — which the player can recover by stealing the USB drive from the hacker's den right after the Pitheath sewage treatment plant.
• Black Site: The Bunker is this. Nuclear research, Uranium enrichment, an army garrison, secret cameras and wire taps on every appliance, and intruders' execution.
• Body Horror: Yes, even in a game about engineering disasters, it still finds ways to scare the living daylights out of an otherwise stoic structural analyst.
• Darkness Equals Death: The map of the Bergmann Tunnels warns employees to keep out of the hallway behind door B2. Unlocking this door leads to a pitch-black dead end and an encounter with the Boogeyman himself, Mörkö. While not lethal, it does result in the player missing out on a Chapter.
• Dead-End Room: Unlocking door B2 in the first level of the Bergmann Water Tunnels leads to a lengthy dark corridor where all the doors are locked with no means of opening them. After wandering and trying doors for a few minutes, Mörkö appears in a Jump Scare and knocks out Mark, who awakens two levels later.
• Disaster Dominoes: Thanks to decades of bad construction practices and corruption, all it takes is Mark trying to open one door in the Bergmann Tunnels to start a chain of collapses ultimately resulting in the failure of the Two Gorges dam, the city flooding, and the potential meltdown of the city's nuclear power plant.
• Double Unlock: Unlocking corridor B2 in the Bergmann Tunnels and the "???" achievement is a triple unlock, requiring you to carry a fuse block all the way from a storage room at the beginning of level (which means that if you don't have it by the time you open the floodgates and trigger the ceiling collapse, you've permanently missed it and have to reload), collect a key hidden behind some junk (also missable), and enter a four-digit keypad code written on a calendar.
• Equipment Upgrade: After finally making it back to the office, Mark obtains a new flashlight, with an unlimited battery life and the ability to temporarily increase the brightness to see further.
• Explosive Instrumentation: Due to malfunctioning electrical systems, steam leaks, fires, and all sorts of other environmental hazards.
• Failsafe Failure: Who designs a nuclear reactor where you have to manually insert the control rods from the bottom? Sane reactor designs have them inserted from the top in case of a fault gravity will insert them. Truth in Television, however, for certain boiling water reactor designs, which have the bottom-entry control rods.
• Festering Fungus: A fungal disease known as the "Stalburg Mushroom Virus" causes bioluminescent green mushrooms to grow on its host, zombifying and ultimately consuming them.
• Fission Mailed: The optional B2 hallway at the end of the first Bergmann Tunnels level is an apparent Dead-End Room where the Player Character is seemingly fatally accosted by the legendary boogeyman Mörkö, but awakens in a storage closet in the chapter's third level, bypassing the second.
• Ghostly Gape: The Bergmann Power Plant's resident boogeyman, Mörkö, sports a White Mask of Doom with gaping eyes and mouth, resembling a blend of Ghostface and Michael Myers.
• Guide Dang It!: One shortcoming of the game that many reviewers noted was the extreme lack of instruction in-game. As such, some puzzles are genuinely so sparse on instruction or even goal that you may end up looking at a play-through or guide on your first run.
• Last Villain Stand: Made both by Hartman and Walter: the former sets up bombs at the entrance of the latter's bunker, while Walter tries to leak to the population the truth about the nuclear weapons program, but is silenced by the government and Hartman's actions before he could make anything public.
• Leave No Witnesses: When a metro train takes the wrong track and crashes inside a secret bunker, every passenger becomes a liability, even children. Made worse by the reports that state that everyone survived the crash.
• Mood Whiplash: For every serious and dangerous engineering flaw you come across, it's usually followed by some hilarious setpieces that may add levity (or confusion) to anyone playing.
  • Special mention goes to the flood door mechanism in Chapter 7, which was somehow reappropriated into a coffee and tea maker. And Mark finds the tea delicious anyway.
  • Another goes to an experimental car in Chapter 8, which is able to autonomously avoid getting parking tickets.
• Multiple Endings: 3 primary endings, mostly simliar and involving Mark catching up with his boss who still has work opportunities available for him while spending time off in a residence after his "long shift" and watching the news on his TV, but with a multitude of cosmetic changes depending on both how many photos you take and how many optional puzzles you undertake:
  • The "Winds of Change" ending is achieved by successfully repairing the nuclear reactor and collecting over 50% of photos and corruption evidence. Here, Mark enjoys his vacation in a well-furnished vacation home, gets word of the NCG's next job at Whitrock Island, and the news discusses Stalsburg's mayor resigning as a result of the corruption scandal
  • The "One Man Is Not Enough" ending is the result of having less than 50% of photos and evidence but still saving the reactor. Here Mark has been forced to move into an apartment at the Turnip Hill slums, with his coworkers very concerned for his conditions.
  • The "Party Like It's 2011" ending is the consequence of failing to repair the reactor in time. Mark is surviving his radiation sickness in a cottage in Finland with empathetic contact from his colleagues, while the news reports on the devastation caused by the reactor's explosion.
  • Two secret endings also exist midway through Act 3, reached by the complex series of tasks that take you from Turnip Hill to the gates to Open Sewer. Attempting to go through them leads to a Non-Standard Game Over where you're executed by mysterious individuals, but if you happen to use a specific passcode on the keypad to the gates (previously used in a Mörkö encounter), you'll get a fake BSOD that soon kicks you back to the main menu.
• No OSHA Compliance: Justified: the game's premise is that after decades of citywide corruption and mismanagement, you're the structural engineer who walks into the city's power plants, dams and other facilities to document how thoroughly decrepit and dangerous they are.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Travel alone through dark tunnels where there's no one to help you and no sign of life.
  • You solve the puzzle to unlock door B2 in Bergmann Water Tunnel 1, then find yourself in a pitch-black corridor. After walking through the darkness a while, you hear a monstrous groan followed by ambient Drone of Dread and increasingly loud Vader Breath, which spurs you to run, only to be blocked by another locked door, then turn around to see the White Mask of Doom of Mörkö the Boogeyman. Cue Smash to Black followed by waking up in a storage closet in Tunnel 3.
• Plot Twist: Walter's tape, found inside his office along with the documents in the hidden room, shows that Walter is being manipulated by a shadow agency. Lampshaded by Mark. Oh, and this is before you find out that there is a secret bunker built for designing nuclear weapons, and the passengers that mysteriously disappeared in a train crash decades ago were executed in said bunker.
• Room Full of Crazy: Some rooms are covered in a lot of weird graffiti, probably due to the psychedelic mushrooms growing in Stalberg.
• Running Gag: "An elevator that didn't fall down?"
• Scenery Porn: Despite running in the ageing Source engine and being produced by a small indie studio, the game features many gorgeous and stunning environments. Special mention to the full 360-degree panoramic view of Stalburg afforded from the top of the blast furnace.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • An unexploded WWII bomb, an opportunity to throw a brick at a cracked dam...
  • In the first level of Chapter 3, the map, a sign, and several documents warn personnel to keep out of the triple-locked corridor B2. Those who dare to solve the puzzle to unlock it will be treated to a (fortunately non-fatal) Jump Scare by Mörkö.
• Screamer Prank: While the game is ostensibly not a horror game, unlocking door B2 in the Bergmann Tunnels chapter leads to a dead-end corridor and an ambush by the white-masked bogeyman Mörkö, which fortunately is not fatal and allows you to skip a chapter.
• Secret Government Warehouse: there are two of those in the Bunker. The first one stores the bodies of the executed civilians. The second one is used for uranium enrichment.
• Sigil Spam: S.N.W. appears almost everywhere in the secret bunker, but it's never spelled out. It doesn't take long before the player realizes that stands for "Stalburg Nuclear Weapons".
• Spanner in the Works: Decades of corruption coverup, subterfuge and criminal activity laying low in the dark corners of Stalsburg have the potential to be exposed by the actions of one wayward engineer just trying to find a path back to his office who happens to be inquisitive about the suspicious things he finds.
• Super Drowning Skills: Walking into deep water spells death, even if it's not electrified or terrifyingly filthy.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: The game presents itself as a mundane Scenery Gorn-heavy first-person exploration game, until you read stories and see murals of the local bogeyman known as Mörkö, or worse, encounter him in person.
• Ten-Second Flashlight: You'll need lots of spare batteries for this and the camera.
• Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: There is a shadowy entity with a White Mask of Doom named Mörkö, which literally translates to "Boogeyman".
• Wham Shot:
  • Mark entering a building early on and discovering a body under a tarpaulin.
  • Then, later on, opening a door in the bunker and discovering dozens of occupied bodybags.
  • Finding Xeander Berg's hideout and discovering that the mushrooms are not only psychedelic, but cause a virus that eventually causes sufferers to dissolve into the aforementioned mushrooms.
• White Mask of Doom: Mörkö (Finnish for "bogeyman") is a shadow creature with a white mask reminiscent of Munch's The Scream, who appears as a hidden Jump Scare in the Bergmann Water Tunnels, and as a Slender Man-style graffiti mural in a bathroom of the Power Plant.

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