After seven Paranormal Activity movies (and an eighth on the way), the found-footage classic horror franchise is finally making its way into the realm of video games. Paranormal Activity Threshold continues the found-footage gimmick, having you play through a first-person perspective, mostly from a camcorder and, in this case, a police bodycam.
During PAX East in Boston, I went hands-on with the game and spent roughly half an hour with it, and came away impressed – it’s one of my favorite games of the show. My demo started with some establishing exposition of a young couple, Robert and Jess, who have just moved into their “new” house.
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It’s a fixer-upper, and Robert is documenting the renovation with his camcorder. Naturally, not everything is as it seems once the couple finds a mysterious box with occult-like symbols etched around it, and the horrors begin.
Paranormal Activity Threshold builds on its franchise’s expectations.
The events of the game unravel through nonlinear storytelling, at least just in the demo. After Robert and Jess open the box, we cut to their mangled corpses through the point of view of Detective Lamar Robins, who has been assigned to the case.
The majority of my hands-on time was with Lamar, which had me exploring the house and solving puzzles strewn about the crime scene to get to the bottom of exactly what happened here. The game absolutely nails the vibe and feel of any Paranormal Activity flick, and the found-footage perspective works well as a style choice, although those prone to motion sickness may want to fudge the game’s settings a bit before getting started.
The couple’s house post-murder is extremely tense, dark, and genuinely scary – one PAX East attendee even vomited at the public demo booth, but the jury’s still out on whether the spooks got to them or the motion sickness. Regardless, Threshold reminds me a bit of Luto in its simplicity; there’s minimal UI, no combat, plenty of psychological horror elements throughout, and it isn’t too difficult.
The bread and butter of the gameplay is in its puzzle design, which is more challenging than I had expected. It requires a lot of outside-the-box thinking, and many environmental elements and objects are interactable. The house isn’t very large, so trudging around to find a solution isn’t all that painful.
If you’ve played The Mortuary Assistant, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into.
I don’t want to give away solutions or spoilers in this preview, but one such instance is when I had to solve a puzzle box at the couple’s dinner table, but the camera angle is oh-so conveniently placed so that I can see both of their corpses the whole time.
Since this is a Paranormal Activity joint, when I would progress a puzzle, the lights would flicker, creepy sounds would come from upstairs, I’d hallucinate their bodies moving (or would I?), the whole nine yards.
Paranormal Activity Threshold is being developed by Brian Clarke of The Mortuary Assistant fame, so if you’ve played through that horror masterpiece, you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into here. My time with Paranormal Activity Threshold was admittedly short, but I’m eager to jump back in once it launches sometime later this year.
