An ingenious mix of retro psychological horror and modern labor themes.
Julien Eveillé’s Threshold is a really cool game. It’s very grounded, but also a little fantastical, and mixes psychological horror with a kind of social commentary aspect. The thing I love about it the most is when we first start up the game it asks us what country we’re from, so when we find ourselves thinking, “oh, God. Like, I guess I’m from America,” it immediately puts weight to our decisions. (There will even be a shirt in our locker once we spawn in that says something like “iHeartWashington” depending on what country we choose.) I don’t know how or if it affects the difficulty (I choose Japan for a second playthrough to get an “IHeartTokyo” shirt) but it’s really interesting.
Threshold is the kind of game that we can play through and enjoy our experience, but then if we watch someone else play it we could probably find things that we never found or see things we didn’t see in our time with it.
The basic premise is that we’re a guy that gets a job working at the top of a mountain. The altitude is so high that it’s hard to breathe, and we have to find little canisters of air that we have to take in. There’s a train that goes through the mountain and we have to make sure it continues on its path. There’s a brake system that holds the train and it’s programmed to release when it hears someone blow a horn. And since we’re the only ones working we have to expunge our air and blow into the horn to make the train keep going. If we accomplish our task we’re rewarded with air canister tickets, and then the cycle repeats once the next train comes through.
The whole game is built around us managing our air intake and doing all these small little tasks, all while something creepy is going on in the background. We can only start exploring the mountain to find out what that is once we figure out the best way to manage our air, which we do by going through our job’s requirements as well as finding more canisters in the environment. The lore of the game develops as we reach these new canisters and explore more, unraveling the mystery of what this mountain is and our place on it.
Threshold is a short, interesting project that works well within the genre of these kind of weird first person horror games. It has a replayable loop and a mystery worth solving, with a great hook of being able to figure out how to manage our air in different ways.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for December 4, 2024. Images and video courtesy Publisher.
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