Julien Eveillé’s Threshold is a simple, yet disturbing psychological horror game. It follows that “blue collar” genre of games where we must complete mundane tasks as part of a day job while a narrative unfolds, similar to Papers, Please or the more recent CorpoNation: The Sorting Process.
In Threshold, we play as someone with a two letter name starting their first day at work as a clerk on a mountain top train station called The Border Post. The job is simple; we must maintain the speed of the train. We do this by blowing a whistle, but the air is thin on top of the mountain, so much so that your only colleague, Mo, communicates to you via pen and paper. Blowing into the whistle comes at a cost, and we must use an air capsule to replenish our oxygen… by biting into the glass vial. But hey, at least the company provides dental care!
Threshold’s gameplay simply consists of exploring the small area of The Border Post, boosting the train’s speed when the alarm sounds, collecting planks, and clearing the water filter. We gain tickets by recycling materials collected from the water filter and speeding up the train, which we can then use to buy more oxygen capsules. Running out of oxygen means death. On the left side of the screen is an image of our mouth, which will steadily grow more bloodied the more we bite into the oxygen capsules, showing our constant juggle with keeping on top of our work while sacrificing our health in the process.
Exploring The Border Post uncovers questions to ask either Mo or the “head office”, which we can contact by entering one of the shacks where an ominous void gives us a direct link to the capital. Inside this shack is infinite air, showing that this company could provide its employees with consistent air if it wanted to, but instead it uses it as a currency to pressure workers into hitting targets. If you do not hit your target then you do not get air. The most horrific thing about Threshold is having to consisently listen to our character break open an oxygen capsule with their teeth and then proceed to choke on and spit out the glass. It’s an absolutely grim sound effect that gets more uncomfortable the more we have to keep on doing it, which is just as well because otherwise there is a distinct lack of tension throughout the game.
While I like the disturbing setting of Threshold and the idea, the gameplay is very barebones, unlike Papers, Please which consistently keeps you on your toes inbetween story bits. There are long stretches inbetween storyline moments where you will find yourself aimlessly wandering around, trying to keep yourself busy by switching between clearing the water filter, collecting planks, and keeping the train going. While Threshold is a short game at around two hours, it definitely would have been more impactful had there been more to discover while completing the mundane tasks.
In terms of the storyline, we are simply carrying out our day while also gathering questions to ask Mo or the capital. These involve questions about items of interest around The Border Post, such as the mysterious grave, or maybe questions we have about this world or how the station works. Not an awful lot of information is shared about the world outside of The Border Post, so it’s hard to understand why our character continues to work in a job where they must munch on glass for scraps of oxygen; there’s no feeling of pressure to remain in this role. There is a message here about blindly following orders, even if it means eating glass, but the player’s own lack of need to follow the orders isn’t taken into account. On top of this, any form of mystery behind what happened to our predecessor is thrown out the window within five minutes of the game when our character quite confidentally confirms that Mo is nice and wonders if we can trust him. I wasn’t even considering this but the moment it was brought up, I knew immediately that we couldn’t trust Mo, and any form of twist that was due to come had been immediately spoilt.
I also found Threshold to be weirdly unstable for what it is. Despite using PlayStation 1-style graphics and being limited to a very small area, the more I progressed with Threshold the more lag I experienced, especially during certain events such as the train slowing down. On top of this, there are very limited checkpoints by design, which sounds fine on paper considering it’s such a short game, but not so much when you keep running into problems. After my first save was lost after an update, I started the game again to get to the good ending. For some reason, it took far longer the second time around for the game to progress, and I was stuck repeating the same chores over and over again for roughly an hour before, finally, Mo appeared to show me the next stage… and then vanished. I hadn’t hit the first checkpoint yet, so had to start again and lose that hour’s progress.
Threshold has some good ideas but unfortunately misses the execution due to how bare bones it is. While it does build some intrigue initially, it holds too much back for the storyline to really grab the players attention and the uninteresting gameplay doesn’t help at all.
Jess played Threshold on PC with a review code.
