I keep seeing people talking about Threshold, a recent indie game about doing a boring job. Though creepy games aren’t generally my jam, all the praise got me curious enough to check it out for myself. I played it a few days ago, and now I can’t stop thinking about it.
You play as the new “yellow clerk” at a train station high atop a mountain–so high, in fact, that it’s hard to breathe, which means the clerk training you writes down his instructions rather than speaks. Your job is weird, but basic: there’s a train that has to go a certain speed, indicated by a colored light. If the train gets off speed, you can blow a whistle into a Half Life 2-looking machine to get it back on pace. You’re also responsible for cleaning out some gunk that piles up at the end of a river and depositing it in a machine.
For these tasks, you’re rewarded punchcards you can use to buy air canisters, which are explained as needing to be glass due to the altitude. You bite them to keep breathing, which makes a dramatic crunching sound and fills an image of your mouth in the corner of the screen with blood.
The trailer above makes the game seem very high octane, but for most of its short run time it’s pretty slow. While the need for enough air canisters adds some pressure, it’s pretty easy to keep yourself topped up. For a lot of the game, I just did my job: wandering from the river to the dumping place, rushing to the whistle machine when I heard the sound of the train slowing. I had enough downtime to watch the punchcard machine slowly print my air tickets. I had enough downtime to start poking around the station, which is when things start to get very weird.
Threshold eventually nudges you to start asking questions: What’s the deal with the whistle? What's behind the dam? What happened to the previous yellow clerk? Why are some of the buildings broken? Where did these fish in the river come from? What’s in the train? You explore these questions by poking around and staring at things, and clues lead you to other clues. It’s easy to miss things, necessitating multiple playthroughs if you want to find out everything you can, but at about an hour for a playthrough it isn’t too onerous. The more things you find and piece together, the stranger and more oppressive the game gets.
After finishing Threshold, I went to the internet to look for some kind of consensus about what it all means, but there doesn’t seem to be one. (The game says it’s based on a “true story,” though I’ll be damned if I know what that refers to.) There are so many things it could be a metaphor for or a commentary on, and I both agree and disagree with every interpretation I’ve seen. The more I roll it around, the more I appreciate what it’s doing, how much lurks below its surface and how, for every question it answers, it leaves even more unanswered, letting you bring your own take to it. I feel uneasy about everything I did in the game, from following my routine to not following it. I still don’t know if I should have trusted anything any of its characters said to me. I don’t know if I made the right choices, from its multiple endings to its opaque country-based difficulty system.
I was worried Threshold would be too scary for me, an inveterate wuss, but it’s more unsettling than horror-y. (It helped that I found a Steam discussion from the creator assuring players there aren’t any jump scares, though there are a few mildly startling moments, and the Steam page warns of the “presence of dead bodies.”) I enjoyed my time with it, but I’ve enjoyed everyone else’s time with it more, watching other players ponder and evaluate the strange experience. Please play it so you can tell me what you think it’s about.
