INFRA is a game that has haunted me for the last decade or so. Released back in 2016, I played a handful of hours of INFRA and then abandoned it – which, considering the content, is ironic.
Over the prevailing years I have occassionally thought back on this strange Source Engine game and wondered: ‘what is INFRA, exactly?’
In INFRA you play the role of a civil engineer in a fictional Baltic city, tasked with investigating engineering structures and documenting signs of dilapidation and mismanagement over one long day. The game was released episodically over a few years and, when combined, it’s three acts result in a hefty game with an estimated 20 hours of content. And what is that content? To be reductive, INFRA is a walking simulator. You interact with buttons, valves, switches in an attempt to resuscitate old factories and ailing pump stations, slowly uncovering a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the city’s public works. Occasionally collapsing tunnels or combusting pipes introduce moments of peril, plus there is some light platforming in-between, but mostly this is a slow, meditative exploration of one of the most cohesive and fully realised virtual worlds I have experienced.
It’s also pervasively eerie. Except for an odd phone call back to the office or the exposition-laden recordings strewn about there are no other people inhabiting these offices and facilities. The tone is so disquieting you almost expect a serial killer or feral animal to attack as you push through all the dereliction. But that quiet is one of the game’s greatest strengths. The mundanity is so pervasive that something as pedestrian as emerging from a tunnel into the bright afternoon sunshine, or seeing a moving car is imbued with gravitas.
At one point in the game, having skulked beneath a water treatment plant for an hour or so I emerged into some trade union offices, and was shaken to note that on the other side of the window I was stood in front of people were casually walking down the street – close enough to touch, and yet worlds away.
I would travel as part of my previous job, and one of my favourite parts of the day was the twi-lit commute home through nameless towns, when the sun was dropping and traffic worked its way lazily through suburbs and onto driveways, the day’s work done. INFRA’s protagonist, Mark, doesn’t get his well-deserved rest until the final credit role, but as you guide him through the alleys of Castle Rock in the sedate early evening there is an echo of that stillness. It’s something that only a combination of Loiste Interactive’s talent and the resilient Source engine can emulate.