Untitled (Underground)

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.