Ad Infinitum is a war game, but it's not a typical war game. It's not arcade-y like some Call of Duty games are nor is aiming to be hyper realistic like Hell Let Loose. Ad Infinitum seeks to focus on the cycle of war and the horrors that manifest from that cycle, though even that isn't a wholly unique idea in war games. What is unique about Ad Infinitum, however, is the approach that developer Hekate takes to get there, an approach that involves inspirations from tales of horror spanning all kinds of mediums to an incredibly eerie array of sounds meant to sound just familiar enough to put you on edge.
During a hands-on experience with Ad Infinitum, ComicBook.com got to speak with Lukas Deuschel, the co-owner of Hekate about the sounds and horrors of Ad Infinitum as well as some hints at why players might want to play through the game not just once but multiple times. "Ad Infinitum" is the name of the game, sure, but it's also a Latin phrase meaning "to infinity" and is used to talk about something that repeats endlessly. The name was as good a place to start as any, so we asked Deuschel how that phrase applies to this game.
"You are stuck in the cycle of war," Deuschel said. "And it's up to the player if you want to break out of the cycle or be stuck in the game because we have different endings in the game based on some decision points."
Set in World War I, a setting most games pass over in favor of World War II or modern-day conflicts, Ad Infinitum focuses not just on a soldier and his allies but also invokes a family drama, too. Just as the version of the war in the game affects the German soldier you play as, it affects each family member, too.
That scratches the surface of Ad Infinitum, but once you see trailers like the one below, you'll see how psychological horror plays a huge part of the formula. Abhorrent creatures and equally disturbing set pieces are just some of the sights you'll see in Ad Infinitum, and when it came to creating those and other horrors, Hekate had plenty to take inspiration from.
Deuschel said that the Hekate developers are "addicted" to all kinds of horror in media with a special appreciation for developers like Frictional Games, the creators of the Amnesia games. Psychiatrist Carl Jung and his explorations of the subconscious and the occult were huge inspirations, too.
"We read a lot of books, Nothing New on the Western Front, Storm of Steel, but also movies like Jacob's Ladder were huge inspirations," he said. "Come and See. Game-wise, of course Layers of Fear."
As big as Call of Duty is, it's hard to divorce any other war game from comparisons to Activision's juggernaut. Players may make view it through the lens of a blockbuster war game at the start, one with epic explosions and moments of betrayal and convoluted narratives, and it kind of seems like Deuschel and the rest of Hekate are hoping that's the case so that they can serve up a misdirection.
"That's what a lot of games do. They kind of use the war topic to entertain players and really have these patriotic vibes to it," he said. "And we play a bit with it, but then we break expectations. We do this throughout the game, breaking expectations of the player. So, you're faced with, "Okay, war is really cruel," and not only for soldiers, but we also show how families suffer from this. How wives suffer from losing their children."
Deuschel said more explicitly later that Hekate employed some red herrings in the game to make players second guess key moments and discoveries. There's a s?ance scene, for example, where a mother is trying to contact her dead sons - you'd be hard pressed to find something like that in another war game.
"We kind of lay out these different kinds of red herrings," Deuschel said. "It's also a bit up to the player to interpret what's real and what's not real."
When you're not trying to sift through what's real and what's not as you maneuver around creatures and the battlegrounds in which the game takes place, you're going to be hearing lots of creepy sounds. You can thank Deuschel for those, too, since he's also the lead sound designer at Hekate. He estimates that about 80% of the sounds in the game were recorded by hand, or in some cases, by foot. Deuschel and the team did things like using shoes with wooden soles in an abandoned factory to record different sounds for impacts on various surfaces, smashing pallets with pickaxes, and getting creative to recreate weapon sounds while working within Germany's firearm regulations. Those are committed methods, but the sounds coming from the creatures are where things really get interesting.
"But I think the trickiest ones, to be honest, are not the authentic wrap-around sounds but the creature sounds. Those are really complicated," he said. "You have to really figure out how to approach it and try different things. For one creature, we use baby recordings of my daughter, and modified them in a really crazy way. You might have noticed in the house this weird whining of the creature when you walk upstairs. That was basically the source material."
Again, it might take you more than one playthrough to experience all these sounds and more since Ad Infinitum does offer multiple endings and paths to achieve those. But in a game this dark, is it possible to come out of it with anything close to a good ending?
"I don't want to spoil too much, but you can kind of have a good ending," Deuschel said. "And I think, to be honest, this one might be even the most effective one. But you also have a really, really bad ending, because imagine your actions have consequences, and maybe it also surrounds your own family. But I don't want to drop too much."
Ad Infinitum is scheduled to release in September for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and the PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. You can learn more about the game from its site.
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