Untitled (Underground)

an idiosyncrasy of found footage horror is that the video itself is a diegetic element; someone must have recorded that footage, and, the more complicated facet, that footage had to have been "found." if the cameraman dies, gets stuck in an alternate universe, or if the camera gets abandoned, there still must be some process where the footage gets retrieved, uploaded, and shared with us, whether that be by the cameraman themselves or a third party (the more worrisome option). the story extends past the final frame of the video.

i played for two endings, (Spoiler - click to show)where the player respectively always selects "there is something" and "there is nothing" when deciding if the looping hallway holds anomalies for aisling. these endings show the different implications of how this footage is found: in the "nothing" ending, they escape with the librarian and sign off their vlog with a "see you next time" - they still have autonomy to edit their journey to tell this story how they please; they have a choice as to whether it gets uploaded at all. in the "something" ending, rather, they wait for help that never comes, with a long train of ellipses that eventually stops with a message of the footage's end[^1]. this ending leaves us with unknowns: what is aisling's status? the cover art for this project is the thumbnail of this video on aisling's youtube channel. who uploaded this?

[^1]: (Spoiler - click to show)for a moment, i expected that the ending was going to be that infinite loop of waiting, and i think i got myself excited by this prospect - aisling is still waiting, the video never ends, this "found" footage may not have been found at all. but alas, i was stubborn enough to have reached that final end screen.

the physical exit 8-like subway seems to be an allegory for the internet: the subway itself is called the ailing broadband underground station; aisling is a 'tuber and refers to the subway as the "tube"; when aisling complains about the "the woman at the front desk" misdirecting them, the librarian says "i believe the algorithm was changed so that what you seek is always out of reach," saying the receptionist is a metaphorical or literal youtube search query. my interpretation was that (Spoiler - click to show)the loop itself is the social media algorithm, its looping nature reminiscent of dark patterns and addictive design that keep people scrolling in tailored feeds. when there's nothing in the loop for aisling, when there's no content in the algorithm, they escape its grasp and move on to their next project. but when there is content, aisling is stuck, maybe as a passive viewer or maybe as a content creator who's chained to these trends in hopes of growing their channel. aisling had no conclusion amidst the content. the content subsumes aisling? in this case, the uploading of this video carries a much more pessimistic undertone: the video, the content, must persist, whether or not aisling or other creators are consumed in the process. the machine grinds on.

this being my read of the project, i think the execution could have been tighter to support these ideas. being a backrooms purist is not a title i care at all to defend, but i found its premise most effective at conception, where the horror was the liminality and uncertainty of the never-ending yellowed rooms instead of the inevitable tendrilled spooky monsters that jumpscare you around the corner. (Spoiler - click to show)for this reason i found the "nothing" ending of untitled (underground) more compelling; aisling has to reckon with their internal conflict of what compelled them to this place. i think it could have been more impactful if it leaned into more play with the spatial horror of a looping hallway, or with a similar uncanniness from the medium itself, and left the fellow traveller transmogrifying into a scary beast for the different ending, as that feels much more like trending content material. the long train of ellipses in the "something" ending was one of the most interesting parts of the piece to me, and i would've loved to see something like that here in its absence.

i also wish there was more exploration with the aesthetics of found footage. i don't think any urban explorer-adjacent youtubers in the 2020s would be filming with 00s digicams that print the time and date in the bottom left corner, how gauche would that be, but maybe adding in hints of glitches or corruptions could look apt. there's ideas of a mixed media presentation going on: aisling and the travelers are full sprites, the librarian is a scanned illustration cutout, the backgrounds are photographs. i really enjoy nulla's chaotic graphic design, like in the cover arts of violent delight, nothing in my veins, the sand at the end, etc, and i think pushing this multimedia style in that direction would lend itself well to this commentary about the internet and its deluge of fleeting trends.

something i missed on my first playthrough was that the black screen for the spectator's dialogue is not pure black, but a very darkened photo of a barren office(?) space. this background is shown in the cover art of the game, aisling's video thumbnail, where it appears as an inverted reflection of a subway window. i like how this imagery is a play on the different meanings of the word liminal: it blends its literary definition (a temporary, transitional state, which i attribute to physical places like hotels, airplanes, subways) and the more popular aesthetic of "liminal" (of regular places that feel uncanny due to abandonment or architectural oddities, like barren storefronts or office spaces). this journey is both a possible transition for aisling as a creator and a mark of their loneliness. as algorithms curate content For You, they isolate everyone else.

I’m still in the middle of playing this game, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be done.

In this story, our focus character Aisling slogs through an endlessly looping tunnel. The setup evokes Exit 8, but with solo-Danganronpa levels of psychic torment. Point is, it’s a trap that Aisling was destined for, and proactively sought out, but does not deserve.

Something interesting is happening with perspective here. We observe the narrator as they observe Aisling’s struggle, which is also content Aisling is creating for their audience, based on someone else’s content they watched once and have been searching for. Later we learn the narrator created this experience for Aisling, without their consent or understanding. Does content have a value, or a cost? Is it good or bad to be watched? Is there a risk in consuming all this content—content like the video Aisling was looking for, which doomed them; content like the video Aisling is making right now? The arrows point in all directions.

I’ve made four loops and each time I ended up somewhere different. Every time I restart the game I notice something new—sometimes because something is slightly different based on my choices, and sometimes because nothing is. A couple times I clicked through the dialogue too fast—did something change that time? But I can't go back. Despite that this story has a straightforward script with occasional binary choices, the gameplay mirrors the setting. I’m lost in the maze. (This is a good maze.)

Nothing feels concrete, but as I look carefully, the details get clearer. I find references to a past audience being spectators to someone else’s public trauma. A ghostly figure appears: did they shed layers of themselves until they became transparent? Can we really learn from watching someone else’s struggle, or is it just gratuitous and damaging? Can I get to the bottom of this after a few more loops? Maybe there’s a path that will let me achieve the satisfaction of a True End or a 100% completed decision tree. Or maybe the paths will keep changing so I can never find what I’m looking for.

I will play at least four more times to find out.

These days, the phrase “significant other” is probably most familiar from a period around the 90s when straight people were flailing around trying to find a less age-inappropriate alternative to “boy/girlfriend”, before giving up and just stealing “partner” from queer folks. But it’s got another, older history: in early 20th-century anthropological theory, a “most significant other” is a person who helps define your identity in your community, through the act of perceiving you and thereby granting you a particular level of status. Early 20th-century anthropology being what it was, the examples I read about in my textbook were preeeety racially coded – chieftains and shamans recognizing people who’ve gone through particular rituals or accomplished impressive deeds – but the basic idea is of course generalizable: identity is status is performance, and performance depends on an audience to view it and respond to it. The place where technological modernity offers a clean break from other modes of social existence, though, is in our severing of these acts of perception from social relationships. What happens when this is all commodified and fed through an anonymized network that offers eyeballs in exchange for content, where instead of status being mediated through a specific set of figures held in high regard (note “regard”, by the way, these dynamics are embedded in our language) by everyone in your shared social universe, it’s the result of easily-manipulated algorithms, parasocial feeding frenzies, and dopamine-feeding likes counters?

Untitled (Underground) is a short creepypasta visual novel, but the above would have been an even more hilariously inapposite opening paragraph if all it had in mind were cheap scares. Oh, the signifiers are certainly here in force, with the protagonist, an urban-exploration streamer named Aisling, tracking down an old video that purports to show the way to a lost Underground (as in, the London subway system) station and ignoring common sense to try to find it for themself. Their hubris is most visibly rewarded by running into some uncanny apparitions, but more unsettling is the monologuing of an unseen narrator, whose words are counterposed with Aisling’s deeper and deeper explorations, recounting an obsession with building more and more elaborate mazes and traps just to see what will become of those sucked into them.

These horror elements, though, didn’t feel especially horrific to me. There’s definitely an aura of menace, and at least one ending strongly suggests something quite bad happening to Aisling, but prose holds things at a remove rather than opting for visceral detail. There’s also not much in the way of a climax, with the mood just building and building until it’s abruptly resolved. Even the creepypasta elements are just, well, creepy, rather than actively threatening: there’s a businessman who keeps walking past Aisling, saying the exact same thing each time, and a rather pathetic ghost, but things don’t really escalate from there.

So I think all this is just the infrastructure that allows the game to play with what it’s actually interested in, which is exactly the aforementioned questions of identity and perception. Aisling is trying to livestream everything that they’re seeing, even well after that point past which it’s clear that there’s real danger here, and that there’s nobody watching on the other end of the camera. The narrator, meanwhile, is a sadist and a voyeur, compelled by a traumatic backstory to reenact terrible situations to see what happens to their victims, observing but never coming into contact with them. The player, meanwhile, doesn’t get to stay innocent of all this: the only gameplay element here is that periodically, a choice will pop up enabling you to decide what happens to Aisling as they keep walking down that endless Tube corridor: either “there is nothing”, or “there is something [presumably bad]”. So the question becomes whether you, comfy in your chair, will tolerate boredom or whether, much like the narrator, you’re jaded enough to inflict harm on Aisling just to relieve the tedium. Everyone is either pathologically watching, or wanting to be watched, but there’s no reciprocity, no engagement: it’s atomized, disconnected, faintly pathetic.

That’s all a reasonable approach for a horror game to think, appropriately intellectual, but I think there are some elements of the design that softened the impact Untitled (Underground) had on me. For one thing, I played twice, the first time going for all “nothing” choices, the second time all “something” ones. In the former case, there’s a happy ending that feels slightly insincere, with an out-of-context character sweeping in for a rescue. The latter course was, as advertised, more interesting, but still suffered from the static pacing mentioned above. In neither case did I come across any plot beats that provided any resolution for the narrator character, and in neither case was the something/nothing choice ever framed diegetically, which undercuts the degree of player complicity. And maybe this reflects a personal bias against streamers, but I didn’t find Aisling at all likeable, which is a totally fine choice for a game to make, but it did mean that I was largely indifferent to their peril. So while I think Untitled (Underground) works nicely enough as an examination of what happens when our Most Significant Others are replaced with A Billion Anonymous Others, there’s not enough blood in its veins to do more than that.