The Steam Awards are here, it's time to pick your favorite games of the year.
If you liked Ad Infinitum, you can nominate it for the "Best Soundtrack" Award!
Ad Infinitum
Nominate us at the Steam Awards!
If you liked Ad Infinitum, you can nominate it for the "Best Soundtrack" Award!
Patch Note | v1.0.5.270558
Our second patch for Ad Infinitum is finally here! All changes are available below.
Please note some fixes are hidden as not to spoil the story. Reveal them at your own risks!
Global:
- Texts now stay on screen for a longer time
- Tweaked the Hungers' animations so they do not sync.
- Trenches - Locked doors in the bunker can't be opened anymore.
- House - Performance increase.
Chapter Specific:
Chapter 1:
- House - Drastically changed the light at the end of the Seance Trench.
- House - The letter in the bathroom now had the correct text on it.
- Trenches - The exploration music stops correctly.
- Trenches - You cannot open locked doors in the Command-Bunker.
- Trauma Domain - Performance increase.
- Ruins - Performance increase when entering the Hunger Area.
Chapter 2:
- House - Changed visual asset for the Urn of Katharina von Schmitt.
- Trauma Domain - Music when triggering the bad ending sequence with Greater Horror Corruption now plays correctly
- Trauma Domain - Reloading a save made after the intro cutscene and using the lever won't skip the boss fight.
- Trauma Domain - Opening the in-game menu won't pause the custscene's music.
- Trauma Domain - High Shadow Settings of Hook-Lights won't cause LOD popping.
- Trenches - Rage gets properly stunned if it charges back towards the player after spawning.
- Trenches - The player cannot get stuck underneath Rage.
- Trenches - Rage won't stay idle close to the player if they entered a tight spot.
Chapter 3:
- House - Limited atmosphere's volume in Wintergarden.
- House - Fixed the "exit basement" objective.
- Attic - The ladder in the attic now works.
- Lazarett - Doors now make the correct sounds.
- Lazarett - Music in Lazarett now triggers.
- Lazarett - The telephone in the waiting room will keep ringing.
- Trauma Domain - Music from the QTE with Thanatos will keep playing when opening in-game menus.
- Trauma Domain - Bossfight music now stops when dying.
- Trauma Domain - Speaker events now stop when finishing the boss fight and starting cutscenes.
- Trenches - Fixed improper camera gliding when shooting at Greater Horror Pain.
- Trenches - Fixed sound loop when player got grabbed by Greater Horror Pain
Chapter 4 (spoiler heavy):
- Good Ending - Fixed player footsteps being heard after hugging the Shadow until the next level was loaded.
- Endings ME - Johannes Voicelines won't play over the Father/Shadow poem when facing the dead father in the office.
If you have encountered any bug, please let us know, we always keep an eye on our social media, including the Steam Community Hub. More fixes are in the work, so keep an eye out!
Patch Note | v1.0.4.270196
We want to thank you for your feedback on Ad Infinitum, and for your patience.
This first patch addresses a copious amount of issues the community made us aware of, and other bugs we found on the way.
Below is a full list of what's been fixed in this update. Please note some fixes are hidden as not to spoil the story. Reveal them at your own risks!
Global:
- Main Menu - Postprocessing Settings are now saved correctly (FOV, Motion Blur).
- Achievements - "Their Names" and "Awaiting Orders" are fixed.
- Subtitles - Disabling subtitles will still provide important clues.
- House - Bird sounds now stop playing when leaving Mother's Room.
Chapter Specific:
Chapter 1:
- House - Corrected nonsensical text in French.
- House - Fixed Gramophone Music in Basement.
- House - Correct voice line will be played at the telephone,
- House - Players won't get stuck in Paul's Room after waking up because the door wasn't working.
- Trenches - The Gas-Field before entering the Morse code Bunker has been fixed, now preventing players to skip the Hunger encounter.
- Trenches - Fixed LOD Popping issues in the Trenches chapter.
- Trenches - You can no longer get stuck in squeeze spaces while walking around Hungers after they swarmed the Morse Code Bunker.
- Trenches - Morse code Device light no longer indicates 37 instead of 27.
- Ruins - Improved guidance to the Rifle.
- Ruins - Made Nyx more visible when entering marketplace.
- Ruins - Player can't walk through a big hole in a wall with a floating brick; this was not intended.
- Trauma Domain - Players no longer get catapulted out of bounds.
- Trauma Domain - Fixed music not playing from the speaker when interacting with the last button at the Gramophone Pole.
- Adjusted the Hunger behaviour to prevent them from jumping over the Morse code table wall and grabbing players too frequently while in squeeze spaces.
Chapter 2:
- Lazarett - Door unlocks after respawning.
- House - Addressed a blocker in the attic that persisted after reloading a checkpoint.
- House - Music no longer pauses when picking up a note.
- House - Correct sounds now play when unlocking and opening the safe.
- Trenches - Players no longer get trapped with Rage.
- Trauma Domain - Voice Memory of the letter in TDE now stops.
- Trauma Domain - Music of Bossfight with Erebus didn't increment and got stuck in the first loop.
Chapter 3:
- House - The telephone close to the attic now stops ringing.
- Trenches - Exploration music won't overlap into the plane cutscene.
- Trauma Domain - Fixed voicelines in French coming from speakers that were heard everywhere due to wrong spatialization settings.
- Trauma Domain - Thanatos grab and camera were broken during Bossfight.
Chapter 4 (spoiler heavy):
- All Endings - Voice Atmos on objects now stop, such as the letter of the mother.
- Good Ending - Voice Atmos of discharge papers now stop.
- Madness Ending - Fixed wooden door sound when interacting with the prison door.
If you have encountered any bug, please let us know, we always keep an eye on our social media, including the Steam Community Hub. More fixes are in the work, so keep an eye out!
The Sounds of Horror
This is particularly crucial in horror games, where players should remain at the edge of their seats, while still maintaining a well-paced build up and release of tension and emotions throughout the game.
Ad Infinitum isn't just a horror game – it's also a timeless story of human suffering and the struggle of overcoming the shadows from the past.
Sound-Design:
In many game productions, stock sounds from selected sound archives are used for audio production. This is not the case for Ad Infinitum. Over the course of the last four years, hundreds of hours of sound recording has been created our game: In field trips lasting several days, we visited numerous locations in and around Berlin, ranging from old churches to abandoned factory sites, as well as a botanical garden with greenhouses just to mention a few.
Armed with our Stereo/Ambisonic microphone set and telescope pole, we defied thunderstorms, downpours, and heavy storms going as far as recording the roaring thunders of a nighttime storm on a rooftop (don’t do it at home!).
Whether outside or in our cozy and sound-proof studio, we always strived to capture even the most delicate nuances. Findings from attics, such as an old pair of leather shoes with wooden soles, allowed us to record consistent footstep sounds for the player: for over 14 surface types, we recorded ourselves walking and running. This way, players always have the feeling of consistency, regardless of whether they are wading through knee-deep water and crawling through mud in the trenches, or wandering through the Schmitt family's mansion with its creaking parquet floors, dusty carpets, and elegant marble tiles. For the tools, we purchased, for example, a replica of a gas mask 17 of the German Imperial Army, one time we scavenged old wooden pallets, which we then shattered with a pickaxe in the studio.
After all that record, we had to put ourselves to work - sound Design Projects can become very big: some of our Cutscenes have up to 600 layers with automated Sound-Design.
Music:
We created 39 tracks for Ad Infinitum, in addition to the cutscenes and jumpscares that are not included on the soundtrack. Music is one of the most important tools in Ad Infinitum to support the storytelling, but also to affect the players emotions.
While some tracks are linear in their progression, many tracks are designed to be adaptive. This means that the music changes according to the game's progress. When the protagonist (Paul) first finds himself in the von Schmitt family mansion, the music has 8 separate stages that change as the player progresses, such as when it has solved a particular puzzle.
The game is built into three main chapters and for each, we established a musical arc that builds itself up gradually but also thematically and drives the story and tension forward. Various leitmotifs are gradually introduced throughout the game and further developed: The Despair motif, for example, which first appears in the mansion during the séance, is then tentatively resumed in the destroyed village establishing a feeling of hopelessness, finally unleashes itself in fury in the Trauma Domain as an epic showdown with the Greater Horror.
The same motifs can be seen throughout the game, the music evolving with the player’s discoveries and relations with his family, each character owning its own leitmotiv and showing their state of mind, from a fragile quiet almost discordant violin, later combined with flutes that take on an almost fluttery, to rattling metallic percussion instruments, that have an almost barbwire like character.
But not only do characters tell their story through leitmotiv and orchestration, and are reflections of certain intimate emotional worlds that the written narrative can only mirror superficially.
Locations receive these qualities, thus the home ("Heimat") motif is already built up in the first chapter while walking through the quiet corridors of the von Schmitt's residence while telling a story of nostalgia and stagnation. This motif is later reintroduced in the trenches, as the front becomes the new home for Paul.
Some of the music pieces were also recorded with live musicians and vocalists. For “Schatten so Süß, in addition to live musicians (cello and piano), we also recorded with a Baritone who sang a German rendition of the original Latin text. Another example is the Lied vom Schatten (Song of the Shadow), which lyrics were adapted after a poem by Leo Sternberg and performed by Achim Buch. Leo Sternberg was a poet who experienced the First World War in all its horrors as a soldier, but who is almost forgotten today. We are proud and happy to be able to immortalize his timeless poetry in our game.
Lukas Deuschel - Song of Shadow (Credits)
Voice Recordings & Design:
Voice recordings play a pivotal role in video games, especially in story-centric ones like Ad Infinitum. The game places a strong emphasis on credible and effective voice recordings, using speech for various purposes within the game's context:
We started thinking about the voice recordings very early on. As the Audio Director of the project, I was in close collaboration with our author Matthias Kempke. A casting was planned and carried out for each language, the goal of which was to find the perfect voice for each character. In addition to acting skills, timbre and the age of the speakers also played a role.
Several voice actors were cast for the main characters of the plot, and in some cases, due to their excellent performances, the actors had a close head-to-head race and it was very difficult for us to make the final decision.
We started with German voice recordings. As with all languages, over the course of several days, Matthias and I directed the performances and made sure that every line was perfectly voiced and reflected the underlying significance of what was being said.
Some of the performances touched the very substance of the actors, for example, to adequately convey the psychotic grief of Magdalena von Schmitt, or the torment that Johannes has to endure.
Significant effort was dedicated to voicing the main character Paul von Schmitt. Despite limited spoken lines. In doing so, my vocal cords (and psyche) were often pushed to their limits, from wild screams while being crushed by Rage or mangled by Hungers, confused groans while standing up, choking coughs, surprised gasps, desperate whimpers, and wails.
Last but not least, one of the most important aspects of the game: the creatures.
While Hunger used a lot of creative sound design (sonar-like teeth clicking coupled with tons of creatively distorted animal sounds), all the other creatures were voiced by some of the team members & myself.
For Mayhem, a lot of liquid was drunk and spat out, and at the same time, very painful manic screaming and vocal outbursts were demanded.
For the Greater Horror of Corruption, it was more suffocating, wheezing noises, which were enhanced by creative sound design (IR sound characteristics of tubes and gas canisters, paired with hissing out gaseous static noises).
We are also particularly proud of Rage - for this, we recorded very special, sometimes very hilarious voice performances (cow-like mooing, gurgling, snoring, etc.) in very high quality, which eventually awoke to the hellish beast through extreme time-stretching and a lot of creative sound design.
We had a lot of fun during the recording, despite the serious nature of our game. Also, we had the feeling that all voice actors were able to passionately express their acting talent. This also manifested itself in spontaneous musical performances of World War I songs, personal anecdotes about the war, or the surprising family connection of one of the voice actors to Kaiser Wilhelm II.
We especially remember the fantastic performance of the now sadly passed away Herbert Tennigkeit (famous for his role as Skeletor in He-man), who despite being well over 80 years old impressed us with his acting skills and vocal performances in the East Prussian dialect.
Lukas Deuschel - Audio Director & Co-founder - Hekate
Ad Infinitum is OUT NOW!
Greetings everyone!
It is with immense pleasure and proudness that we're finally releasing Ad Infinitum on PC!
We sincerely hope you'll enjoy the game as much as we did making it.
If there are any issues or feedback you'd like to give us, please post them on the Steam forums. We're always keeping an eye on it and are reading all of your comments.
If you haven't watched it yet, here is the launch trailer:
Get Ad Infinitum:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1234430/Ad_Infinitum/
Hosting an AMA on r/HorrorGaming!
We're happy to be hosting an AMA session on r/HorrorGaming right now!
Come ask us questions about the game, its development and more here:
https://nacon.me/adinfinitum-AMA
Launch Trailer
Are you ready to jump into the maw of madness?
The trenches of World War 1 — and the things inhabiting them — are waiting for you. If you've pre-ordered the Supporter Edition of the game, you can head to this hellish and distorted world only a sick mind would be able to see today at 6pm CEST.
Or if you've decided to wait two more days, you can prepare yourself with our launch trailer!
Get Ad Infinitum:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1234430/Ad_Infinitum/
Story Trailer
Is it a nightmare, or is it reality?
A new Ad Infinitum trailer is out, with the game releasing in SEVEN DAYS!
Pre-order the Supporter Edition of Ad Infinitum and get access to the game 48 hours early!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1234430/Ad_Infinitum/
Gameplay Overview
There are vile monsters lurking within your sick mind. The war, family, madness...
Out in September 2023, Ad Infinitum will bring you face to face with your demons.
Here's some new gameplay, featured in today's Nacon Connect.
You can also check the Steam stream for more!
Ad Infinitum at Nacon Connect
You'll be able to see some exclusive gameplay of Ad Infinitum tomorrow during the Nacon Connect, along some other incredibly good lookin games. Go on the YouTube link and click on the "Notify Me" button to not miss it!