Threshold review: a horrible act of corporate confusion that will leave you breathless

Threshold is the kind of horror game that keeps just enough distance to really make your mind burn while you play. After landing a coveted government job, the game begins as you prepare to take on your first shift manning an important maintenance outpost just outside the city walls. But before we even arrive, it's clear that something is wrong. A low, angry, muffled voice directs him towards an elevator. There's an oxygen meter to your left, and as you begin the long climb to the surface, you watch your supply dwindle to almost nothing. The air is thin here, to the point that the employee you're relieving, a no-nonsense guy named Mo, speaks to you through hastily written notes, since talking simply takes too much effort.

Before you can ask yourself “what the hell have I gotten myself into?”, Mo hands you a whistle and leads you to a large speaker in the center of your work area. Blowing the whistle here ensures that the big, ominous train moving across the river keeps moving at the “expected pace,” and you'll have to quickly return here every time it starts to slow down to make sure it keeps up. a day. For what purpose, they don't tell you. Only this is what the capital dictates. The problem is that, since the air is so thin up here, blowing that whistle is surprisingly exhausting, so you'll have to clench your teeth on little cans of air to catch your breath every time you start wheezing or feeling sick. black and pixelated veins appear. clouding your vision. And the more Air Cans you consume, the bloodier the small image of your mouth begins to appear in the upper left corner of the screen.

But this strange and disturbing configuration is just the tip of the iceberg. As you settle into a gentle rhythm of keeping the train moving and pulling tickets from a special machine to exchange them for more cans of air, questions begin to arise about the reality of this place, both for your employee and for you as a player. . Why is the bathroom closed? And why does the river drain when the train brakes? Who was Ni, the employee you replaced? And why does Mo hate them so much?

Your secretary will register some of these questions in his or her own mind, but it is harder to find answers. Threshold does a brilliant job of letting these thoughts sit with you for a while, seeding his ideas early on and without context for them to spread in your head, before finally offering his own answers, although whether you believe them is another question entirely. . The sparse and potentially unreliable script repeatedly clashes with the clear evidence in front of you, although the shifting textures of the game's PS1-era visuals certainly help to make it all feel a little otherworldly at the same time. Still, even when the answers arrive, they sometimes raise even more questions in the process, and Threshold's greatest strength is how it gives you the space to form your own conclusions about what's really going on here.

In the meantime, of course, you'll need to keep that train running. As the corporate plate-spinning cycle begins again, Mo's other tasks begin to appear to divide his attention, such as collecting loose wooden planks or keeping the end of the river free of “unwanted biomass.” But they are all designed to delve deeper into that fundamental mystery, introducing increasingly strange elements to ignite your imagination. The more involved you become in the work, the more absurd it begins to seem and it becomes a very effective tool in fueling your desire to discover the truth of this place once and for all.

At each moment, the gradual accumulation of tasks is also a satisfying exercise in itself. The water filter where the biomass accumulates is quite far from the horn and the machine that dispenses the air can be fine, for example, and walking in water puts even more strain on your already fragile lungs. The time and oxygen required by all this must be weighed against the rhythm of that infernal train, and every time I contemplated getting off there, I found myself straining my ears to listen for that telltale screech of the train's brakes that always precedes its hour of departure. arrival. about to slow down. You'll wonder if there's something better you could do with your time, another task you could complete along the way, or when it would be best to bite into another can of air so you can make the most of your remaining breaths. Even when you question your role here, it's hard to resist becoming the perfect image of industrial efficiency.

In fact, there's never so much on your plate that you can't keep things running pretty well, despite ever-present threats to your overall well-being. If the train starts to run late, for example, the air dispenser stops working and will not work again until the expected pace has been reached again. Therefore, you'll want to carry a healthy supply of air cans and tickets with you at all times, just to make sure you don't come up short. But as long as the train keeps running, the ticket machine will keep drawing cards for you, and it does so with a pleasant chnk-chnk-chnk that only speeds up as the expected pace of the train increases. It would be difficult to do a bad job or run completely out of breath, for that matter, but the ease with which you can correct course doesn't make the work any less compelling at the moment.

That's partly because Threshold is never content to let that general status quo last for long. Rather, it's the gradual, expert interruptions to your work pace that make the game feel so exciting and alive, as if there's some kind of unknowable force writhing beneath the surface, just out of sight. As the earth begins to shake, the river begins to rise, and the mountain moves more and more violently beneath your feet, the structure of the world reflects that growing pressure cooker you have bubbling in your own mind, all building and building until that the center can no longer hold on and everything explodes in one of the most spectacular endings that I think I have seen all year.

And yet, even after all that, Threshold still isn't ready to let go of you, as a final teaser reveals another layer of the game's underlying truth. It's enough to make you come back for another turn and continue searching for answers to their impossible questions. There's a sense that you'll never be able to encompass the full scope of the role your employee has been assigned, but it's the act of reaching out that makes Threshold so deeply and utterly fascinating.

A copy of Threshold was provided for review by publisher Critical Reflex.