Threshold review — The train must run

After signing your waiver, board the elevator up to the top of the mountain and take a deep breath. The job is simple: keep the train running. Don’t mind the giant wall with a towering building on the other side, just keep the train running. The water is drinkable if you ignore the sour white substance, and you can take in the beautiful trees that have been built for you to boost morale. It’s good honest work, you don’t need to know all the details. Just keep the train running.

Threshold is a game of curiosity, and sees you working as a train station operator whose primary task is to ensure that the train cars keep pace on their delivery. While those two things don’t immediately sound like they would go hand in hand, the strange and bizarre things that go on at the station ensure you’ll want to keep exploring. While I wouldn’t say this game was ever really scary, it certainly was atmospheric with its gritty pixel color schemes and oppressive environments. 

Taking over for the Purple Clerk Mo, you work the Yellow Shift. While your main duties are focused on keeping the train running, you’ll also need to do various chores like recycling material, cleaning and patch-work repair jobs. Your coworker Mo is also working overtime, so he is around to help answer questions alongside the mysterious Capital in Building 1. This allows you the chance to point at objects and the environment to learn more about the station from Mo, and helps to uncover the truth behind the unceasing train delivery.

One of my favorite parts of Threshold is how typically mundane chores can take on a weird twist. Want to speed up the train for example? Just blow a whistle into a gigantic horn that bellows a low note to motivate the train cars. Need planks to board up that hole? Well surely that gravesite doesn’t need that post any longer, right? Your reward for these tasks are dispensed as punch-card tickets, which can be redeemed for a special resource: air.

The train station is nestled near the peak of a mountain, meaning that the air is thin. To keep yourself alive, you’ll have to keep a steady supply of single-use air canisters. Each canister only gives you one breath, so it’s something I had to constantly be wary of while fulfilling my regular duties. My biggest issue with this system is that it’s also tied to your sprint, meaning if you want to move around more quickly it’s going to cost you air, which was honestly just annoying more than anything. It’s certainly a unique concept that adds tension, but with how easy it was to stack up a decent supply of air I rarely felt like I was in danger of suffocating and it became sort of an afterthought during exploration.

On that note, while the area you can delve into isn’t that large, there are quite a reasonable amount of secrets to discover. If you’re looking closely you might even discover a strange duck, which of course follows you around despite protests from Mo. The game also features an option at the start of the game to help you make these discoveries if you want an easier time, but still provides you the chance to discover the secrets on your own if you so choose. Also selected at the start of the game is a country, which doesn’t change the language, but actually changes the difficulty. Just another weird quirk that Threshold has, don’t look too deep into it. The game also has four different endings, and while they aren’t dramatically different from one another, it was enjoyable to seek out what I needed to do differently to achieve them. 

Threshold is ultimately an atmospheric mystery atop a mountain peak, and one that I found to be intriguing from start to finish. Sure some of the gameplay mechanics feel a bit obtuse to navigate, but it wasn’t enough to get in the way of my enjoyment of the strange and eerie happenings at the station. It’s a game you can complete in an evening or two, depending on if you want to seek out all the secrets and endings, so if you’re a fan of the indie mystery genre this might just pique your interest.

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