"The old world is dying, the new world is slow in appearing, and in this chiaroscuro monsters arise," wrote Antonio Gramsci to explain that the RATP controllers never get on at the same station as you, nor at the one where you get off, but right in the middle of your journey, as if by chance.
What old Antoine was touching is that monsters - the real ones, not the Nazis - are born in the in-between. The uncanny valley that is often mentioned in digital images or in robotics, Freud's uncanny, corresponds to "the intellectual uncertainty about whether something is alive or not". Death would suit us as well as life: it is in the passage that anxiety nests and waits.
Liminal spaces are to places what uncanny valley is to faces: a frozen in-between, neither really there nor really elsewhere. These are the strange photos of a set of empty offices bathed in a yellowish light, these municipal swimming pools with their tiled floors and walls, without swimmers, in architectures that do not correspond to their function, these corridors surrounded by closed doors where no one normally lingers, these deserted supermarkets, these forgotten hotels of which the Overlook in The Shining is the most disturbing representative.
In-between. To be honest, this column would not exist without
on liminal spaces, thanks to which I discovered The Complex: Found Footage, a horror game that plunges the player inside these intermediate spaces, with no other artifice than that of an impossible architecture and a space that seems, always, in transition. In the form of a found footage, The Complex places you, camera in hand, inside one of these strange and melancholic spaces, outside of its function and time.
I'm not going to tell you what to expect from The Complex. The game will only take you about an hour. All I can tell you, and this has already been said by Eyepatch Wolf, is that the author of the game has perfectly understood where the terror in the liminal spaces comes from. He doesn't try to disguise a more conventional horror with a setting plucked from 4chan, Reddit or Instagram. It is, perhaps, the only real game whose horror really relies on the somewhat vague anxiety of watching videos of places that both look real and shouldn't exist. With headphones on and the lights turned down a bit, it's both beautiful and terrifying.
Genre: horror
Developer: IsarL
URL : The Complex: Found Footage
