ettolrach
(she/her)ettolrach
(she/her)Written by ettolrach, 2025-12-29.
If you haven't played the game yet, I highly recommend you do. The game will be scary. Despite enjoying horror games, I get scared very, very, easily. That said, I could cope fine with this game. If you're looking for horror, then this may be a little disappointing. But the story here is amazing. If it was a different genre, say, a visual novel or strategy game, I would still recommend it just for the story. The gameplay is very good too. It reminds me of an evolution of Iron Lung. You should buy it, especially because it's very cheap too. Oh, and it has good lesbian and trans representation.
Please play the game before reading on. It's worth it.
I'm very conflicted about the gameplay and the horror. Maybe I'm getting at playing horror games? I didn't feel /that/ scared playing it. Perhaps it's the framing of the player. You're tasked to find the research that the group produced in exchange for medical procedures being paid for. Although I do care for what happened to the group, I don't want to do any original research of my own. I simply scanned each location, went back and read the files, and kept going until I could choose a pod. The pod I chose was the one destined for the surface. And as you may know (since I didn't initially realise there were two options, I could only find one due to my terrible navigation skills), that ending is slightly less climactic.
When the '?' entity appeared on my radar, I simply approached it, ignoring the advice given at the start. And I expected to die or enter some sort of fail state and restart. But nothing happened. After that first interaction, I was quite a bit less scared. I feel like /Iron Lung/ did it better, how the submarine was thrown way across the map. You didn't have the time to choose whether to run or not. It just happened.
I am reminded of a comment I read on Joseph Anderson's video on why he doesn't find horror games scary (Anderson, 2018). That the horror is that the situation is scary, not that there is an actively scary thing. The themes are scary, not the monster chasing you. And while I kind of agree, I still think that when we watch Psycho, we're supposed to be scared of Mrs Bates as Lila approaches the Bates' house. After having played Proximity, I don't stay up at night thinking about that research station or the hole. Maybe if the story wasn't as good, I would. But the story is too good and overshadows the gameplay. I think the game relied too much on the situation itself being scary without putting the player in enough danger.
Perhaps I agree with Anderson. Perhaps I wish there were more consequences without dying.
There are two sideplots that the game presents (the main plot being about the player): the dynamic between Ella and Willow, and Simon and Oliver.
I saw someone reading Ella and Willow's relationship through a transmisogynistic lens, that Willow is rejecting Ella (and not being clear with Ella about her reasons until a lot of pressure was applied) because she isn't comfortable dating a trans woman, or some other similar reason. While I can see where they came from, I think that the game shows enough of Willow for me to understand her reaction. It's also never confirmed that she is cis (in fact, I thought she was a trans woman too while I played), which makes me more hesitant to see the same.
Ella and Willow are both scared. But Ella is scared about her past and about how she is. She's scared that people are judging her for her being trans or bipolar (even though we can see that the other people in the team don't care about these things about Ella). When she's rejected, she tells herself that the abuse she's experienced in the past shouldn't make her accept a poor relationship, but then uses (what one could read as) abusive tactics on Willow after getting rejected.
Willow is scared of what she's doing. Why did she decide to do this highly unethical job? In fact, I think her own self-hatred is exactly why she rejects Ella. She just isn't capable of a relationship in this environment. She wants to hide the fact that she's having nightmares and regrets from Ella, so she chooses the simpler option: be vague and just say 'no'.
I don't really know what my point is. They're both not doing well. I love toxic yuri.
I have surprisingly little to say about the relationship between Simon and Oliver. Maybe that's because I'm already quite familiar with it from my real-life. A start-up, in this case a research-group-gone-start-up, convinces a bunch of investors to invest in something totally unrealistic. It doesn't happen and thus goes south. We find out at the end of the game that Simon was already mentally unwell from the start. At least he's not the only one on the station.
I'm not too interested in the main story of the game, but my reading is similar to Power Pak (2025)'s. The hole is a way to make the player choose whether they have 'learnt' from the story. Do they go up to the surface to get their medical procedure paid (how do you know you will? It's unlikely you will be considering your supervisor abandons you at the end of the game), or do they follow Willow and sacrifice themselves in hopes of subduing the hole (which appears to have worked, considering that the hole hasn't swallowed the research base yet, even after quite some time has passed).
I think that these three plotlines: Ella and Willow, Simon and Oliver, and the player's playthrough and final choice, all make the game a very melancholic game. When I finished the game, I felt sad. I didn't even get that scared. I loved the game. I wish I had more to say about it.
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