“Horror” and “automation” are concepts I’m used to seeing together in fiery/weepy essays about late capitalism. I’m less used to seeing them together in videogame marketing blurbs. Horror, in an automation-based game? Why, games with automation are supposed to deliver the finest and most methodical of chemical highs. They are supposed to feel like building yourself a better brain out of candy-coloured conveyor belts and smelters. They are not supposed to make you afraid.
The game that inspires these ruminations is Beyond the Doors, out this year, which has an alpha demo on Steam. It casts you as a lonely greasemonkey working in the basement of a dour, weed-hung apartment building. Your job is to bug your neighbours, in the sense of placing them under surveillance. Every night, somebody emails you to request that you set up a listening device near somebody else’s door, then send them a recording of any activity within.
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Gathering these recordings is a ponderous challenge, partly thanks to cumbersome, MicroProsaic interface design, but also because Beyond The Doors wants to be ponderous. You have to daisy-chain devices, copying and pasting codes to synch them together. Then you have to select and save the file using DOS commands on your server computer, before wiring it to your desktop for analysis.
The fiddliness of all this is intensified, of course, by the nape-tickling awareness that Something Is Wrong. The apartment block is all greyspace and neglect, built around a central chasm with a webbed glass ceiling. You fear to turn your back on any particular door, any particular corner.
There are boulders of trash that sort of multiply like amoeba when you pick them up, but may have useful objects beneath them. The worst part, possibly, is that I can’t find a way to listen to the files I’m recording. I have no idea whether this is deliberate, or a limitation of the demo, but I think Beyond The Doors is more powerful for refusing to satisfy the very voyeurism it kindles.
I didn’t get far enough to experience this in the demo, but going by the above header image and the trailer, it all gets a bit freaky later on. I’m intrigued to see how that freakiness gels with the absorbed tinkering that defines most automation-based games. In this case, you’ll be overhauling your surveillance network with cash from each job – merging chains and installing upgrades.
“This alpha version includes the core gameplay loop: placing recorders, building receiver networks, collecting sounds, and sending reports,” write developers Dream Error on Steam. “There’s much more to come, this is just the beginning.” There’s a development roadmap, if you’re into that kind of thing, but Beyond The Doors is probably more fun if you preserve your ignorance before taking the plunge.