I don’t think any video game I’ve ever played that tries to deliberately play up the “liminal spaces” angle has ever achieved even a quarter the liminality captured by sheer accident in the act of backtracking in a certain brand of late 1990s to early 2000s console RPGs.
You know the ones – from that era where the idea of linear, event-driven stories had just caught on, but the practice of putting the world map itself on rails wasn’t yet de rigeur, so you could in theory revisit anyplace you’d ever been, including the areas that literally only existed for the purpose of one specific setpiece.
When you returned to such an area, all of the monsters and NPCs would be gone, and there’d be no music or audio ambience because no non-event-related soundtrack for that area had ever been written, which made the game’s regular sound effects seem conspicuously louder. Just wandering around in this empty, silent backdrop; maybe you’d run into an NPC the devs forgot to dummy out who still acts like the event is ongoing, repeating now-contextless lines of dialogue and gesturing frantically at thin air. Maybe you’d stumble upon a treasure chest you missed the first time around, and the “item get” jingle would crack like a gunshot. Maybe there’d even be a room where the devs neglected to unset the event flag, and you’d suddenly be assailed by pulse-pounding techno heralding the approach of absolutely nothing.
Like, forget the Backrooms – give me a game that plays with that.
