Hey, did you hear the one about the undersea research base that lost contact with the surface and some lucky person had to go down there to find out what had happened? Yes, I’m afraid that’s you in the short-form undersea horror PROXIMATE (Cain Maddox, 2024).
Much thanks to Zaratustra for echo-sounding me about it. It’s a first-person adventure with one small caveat: your vision has been augmented. That augmented vision is amazing and here’s a sample:
Your visual cortex is now hooked up to a genius AI whose job is to describe what lies in front of you so you don’t “miss any details.” Unfortunately, this AI is not perfect, just like real life.
But even better than this batshit premise, PROXIMATE is a horror game with heart. It’s about the horrors of capitalism rather than, say, the generic murders of little children or uploading your dead wife’s ghost onto an abandoned deathmatch server. PROXIMATE is one of my favourites of 2024. Yes, the whole year!
Naturally, the AI conceit cleverly minimises the presentation of the game – instead of hi-def visuals or reams of descriptive text, the PROXIMATE AI will just give you a word like “LAPTOP” or “DOOR”. While interactive fiction is well-known for prose to fire up your imagination, PROXIMATE gets you to construct spaces with a sprinkling of disconnected words. Your visor also offers a compass and the AI’s confidence rating of its description.
Now I won’t pretend it takes a little while to acclimatise and the most complex task hits you straight out of the airlock. Actually, it’s the airlock itself. We start out in a submersible docked with the lab and have to get through the two airlock doors to begin our dark explorations. Both doors are labelled AIRLOCK. Cue confusion.
But let this not dissuade you. I expected this to be the totality of PROXIMATE: a horror in which you navigate a dangerous space blind. But it isn’t because, yo, this belongs to a game category I’ve just christened as Angry Games. I love this angry game.
While you might think it’s important to discover what happened, the investor only cares about recovering their expensive research data. We’re directed to upload as much data as we can lay our hands on and, invariably, we end up retrieving a bunch of chat logs from various devices which paint a strange picture. There’s a dysfunctional romance (or two), laughs, terror and bewilderment. And something hungry in the dark.
It is now time to broach the spoilers’ lair. If you want to give PROXIMATE a go, which is not a long game, you should just go buy a copy and do that and make your way back to my well-chosen words later. They will wait. Because they are hungry.
// ravenous spoilers below //
// do not break seal //
// ravenous spoilers below //
// do not break seal //
After I had resolved the airlock confusion, the first thing I encountered was a laugh. The lab’s lobby contains what the AI describes as “minced beef” and “ketchup”. The AI is not wholly sure, but as you get closer, your footsteps become… squidgy. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t “minced beef”. I’m pretty sure that that wasn’t ketchup.
This establishes an early impression that PROXIMATE is a sequence of madcap jokes about a misfiring AI, but I’m not sure I recall any other jokes along these lines, aside from the DOG incident, with the design leaning more heavily on the dread that single-word magic conjures in your mind. It’s similar in feel to a game about navigating a world as a blind person. And there’s a message here, right? That surrendering our lives to tech is blinding us in ways we might not be able to appreciate.
It plays with the blindness in several ways. Early on, just as you start to find your feet, our corporate handler steals the map from us to create more “download space” in our visor, meaning you have to start working around the space using your memory. You can, of course, take a screenshot and print it out, but you’d be missing out if you did that. Later, you find a vent to get around a locked door – but it isn’t on the map, so you can end up feeling very lost. And there’s definitely something down here with you. Something that is breathing.
Despite the subject matter, PROXIMATE’s most shocking moment is when the visor accidentally downloads and installs the “DOG” update which makes the AI render the description of everything as DOG. Oh the delicious panic this generates: we’re deep inside the research lab, fully aware there’s something murderous prowling its corridors, and now we have to navigate our way out using the distance indicator and sound alone. I was exhilarated on making it back to the submersible in one piece.
Now, it soon emerges that the research team is down here to keep their work in a legal limbo zone, because of unethical shit they’re pulling: this team is determined to combine the dead with AI. If that isn’t whack enough for you, the motivation is because people “don’t want to work” any more. If they can replace humans with chipped zombies, then it’s more profit for the corporations. So, we’re talking about the natural endpoint of unfettered capitalism: hire nobody yet somehow expect the people to pay for product.
We’ve all seen this scenario play out in horror fiction, time and time again. Corporations do questionable science shit which seeds something grotesque and murderous. We think we know where this is going: team Techbro Frankenstein created its Monster and it has killed them. But, here’s the rub. As you progress through device after device, it doesn’t seem like anything interesting was happening with their research. The money moment never seems to arrive. When does the AI go mad?
What elevates PROXIMATE is that it pointedly refuses to give AI tech any credibility and makes a beeline for a more cutting post mortem regarding capitalism. The research was a complete failure with likely fuck-all real science to back it which is catnip to “smart” investor-morons who were persuaded to pump millions into it. Look, to be fair to the fictional researchers, all of the research was deleted as a middle finger to the company man, so it’s possible they were actually making progress. But if science bumping flesh with capitalist amorality isn’t what killed everyone – what actually went wrong? Why is there something pounding the dead corridors of the undersea complex?
In a Lovecraftian turn, it’s because they found a “hole” in the ocean depths that is left relatively undescribed. All we know is that it is expanding, that it is hungry. Those who witness it develop an unhealthy fascination with the hole and the project lead becomes convinced it is vitally important. He is determined to launch one of the project’s corpses into the hole. A vote was held, the corpse was sent… and it came back to kill them all.
Yes, the Lovecraftian horror they found was capitalism. Maybe I can persuade you by calling it C’thapitalism. A hole that is constantly hungry. That will eventually eat everything. Individuals fall under its sway and think it’s more important than their paltry humanity. And the foul things people do in its service will eventually crawl back to eat them. (Hmm, now I’m reflecting on how the ZomAI project itself was a hole hungry for investor cash which would never be satisfied.)
There’s even a little side plot where Savannah, the Ops officer, thinks it would be funsies to introduce a corpse into the food, meaning everyone gets to eat a bit of human. It’s the dog eat dog view of capitalism literally plugged into the story. And there’s a punchline to this joke for those paying attention! It is revealed towards the end that two people escaped only by feeding Savannah’s corpse into the recycler. “I never thought leopards would eat MY face.”
And, bro, I haven’t even gone into the romantic subplot that ticks over in the background. It’s not just messy but also touching and ultimately pivotal. It features the line “im making toast do u want some” which, absent of context, looks normal, but it made me howl with laughter.
Does PROXIMATE have any flaws? Sure it does. At times, you might find the logistics of these scattered logs and how they are conducted a bit of a stretch, just like every other log scavenger hunt, but it’s in the service of something greater. I also sometimes wanted a bit more of the characters than I saw – it’s a large ensemble and difficult to get them all enough screen time, such as Savannah for example. And the implication you’ve taken this job because you’re a convict – thus a modern slave in a “meritocratic” society that claims it is above such things – is not just on the nose, but shoehorned in at a late stage, leaving the game no room to explore it. It’s also an extra thread that the story doesn’t need, but I’m willing to hear opposing arguments.
None of this erodes PROXIMATE’s brutal, sardonic power. It is a gruesome but brilliant tale that speaks of a system that doesn’t just encourage economic cannibalism but glorifies it. I give it three standing ovations out of three.
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I had never heard of this, and I am now really intrigued. I did not break the spoiler seal but just wanted to let you know I’ll be giving it a go soon, it sounds RIGHT up my alley.
I think you’d definitely love it, James. I hope to play more story focused games now that I’m into my Thinky retirement!
I prefer my games to be escapist voyages, not regurgitation of reality, that’s why the latter is better!
Sounds interesting, I’ll buy it but if I don’t like it I’ll be back with complaints
And I’ll be here for your complaints, if not your refund.
I wonder if you ever feel that a critique embedded in a piece of media can be too… I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, but – too aligned with your sympathies? I remember reading What a Carve Up, which is very much an Angry Book, but while I agreed with all its politics they felt so, I don’t know, on the nose? I came away from it feeling like I’d gotten very little from the experience except for some mutual back-patting and head-nodding with the author.
On the other hand I recently read The Grapes of Wrath for the first time which is equally Angry but didn’t get the same impression; it felt relevant and vital. So I’m left wondering what the difference maker is? Possibly delicacy of handling the subject material. Or maybe it’s just that the historical distance the latter novel overcame to deliver a message I still recognised impressed me.
CA: I think it’s the difference between “This is a work that grapples with and explores the actual human suffering and the indignities both great and small that come from this problem” vs. “I have some political opinions and this book is a thinly veiled way of me telling you those opinions”. One is humanizing, the other is informational — so it will only ever work on people who haven’t been exposed to that information before. (And tbh I think those books often feel alienating and flat, so I don’t think they achieve their objective very well anyway.) Also, in the former, the focus is on the characters and their emotional journeys and struggles. In the latter, the emotional centerpoint is the author themselves and how important they are. (Rolls eyes.)
I’m currently making a very political video game (it’s about an anti-capitalist revolution) and I’m try to focus more on the human side of things. It’s tricky, though, because how do you explain the position of the revolutionary vanguard party without resorting to theory? Still haven’t quite cracked that bit.
CA
“…too aligned with your sympathies?”
A long long time ago, I wrote about a small project called Wikileaks Stories and I suggested:
I do somewhat get hung up with agitprop games or meaningful political games because of exactly your point. They don’t convince or convert – they’re just thoughtworthy for those of the right persuasion. Still, they’re a better use of your time than high fiving 100 like-minded social media tweets. Something you agree with already can still be useful for helping to marshal your thoughts, provide more structure than just clumsy, naked emotion.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people will just find PROXIMATE to be a creepy good time but I really appreciated the satire and how its ideas were all threaded together – I was a little jealous of its craftwork, to be honest.
James
An anti-capitalist revolution? That sounds like escapist fantasy, I’m pretty sure Maurycy will love it 😀 If anyone is curious, please note that Duskpunk was featured on the last Crashbook…
This reminds me: I think it’s high time I tackled something like Citizen Sleeper.
Is this the second time I will buy something just on the account of a couple of your paragraphs? Probably. (the first was Leap Year, which ended up being one of the best games I played last year – and one of the few I immediately bought DLC for)
I might just buy it tonight, as soon as I get home. I’ve been on an anti-capitalist game streak (Citizen Sleeper 2 and Another Crab’s Treasure, both absolutely excellent), so why not continue.
Reporting back. SPOILERS of course.
I thought, while I was playing, they have to take the visor off at some point, right? And, they do, but not in the way I expected. I also didn’t expect the whole “one-word description” gimmick to be so evocative and hold up for the entire thing. I don’t know if anybody else saw this, but at the very beginning, when you first dock at the station and have to find the airlock from the console, for a split second, if you face the porthole of your sub, it flashes “eye”, before going back to “porthole”. I swear I spent a couple of minutes, before doing anything else, going back and forth arount the porthole, dreading the fact that the closer you get, the lower the confidence of the AI goes. But the “eye” never came back.
Another thing that I loved is that in a few different places, dealing with body parts means you have to go “through” them – objects in the environment block you, but body parts sometimes don’t. In the freezer chambers, I found myself facing a “head” whenever I turned, realising at some point I’d have to go forward blind (well, blindER), and that was one of the most uncomfortable moments.
Navigation can be a pain, yeah. Especially the first run after your map is gone, I wasted more time that I care to admit trying to find the entrance to the bathroom. But, on the whole, the loop worked for me. It was fun (and horrific) trying to paint a picture of a new room in my head. What didn’t especially work for me was the creature you encounter in a couple of moments.
Now, I don’t know what a solution could be. But I didn’t find those sequences particularly tense or scary. The visor doesn’t register anything, but the radar does, and sometimes it register the thing on top of you, breathing becoming louder, and then… it leaves. I think in one spot it roams around a bit, and at that point I started moving more slowly but… I couldn’t understand if it changed anything. I’m sure a SOMA-style (Amnesia-style) chase would be awful and probably out of place, but I think they could have done something more with that.
Now, the story. The twist in the end was fun and painful: this wasn’t a forward-looking business or research venture, just another money sink with dubious promises. I especially loved the way your handler unceremoniously drops you in the last call, without even finishing his one and only sentence directed at you. I loved the many “league tonight?”, and particularly the last one, after the creature had already broken through. If capitalism is horrific, it’s because it makes the most horrific things routine while it forces you to be part of it. I know that this is a game that will benefit from another go, to re-read all the details with the knowledge of where it’s going.
Thanks for the recommendation Joel, I had seen footage of this game on social media but it wasn’t really on my radar (heh). Something that has similar vibes, even if it is for the most part a more “traditional” first-person horror adventure, is Mouthwashing, which I’m sure everybody knows about at this point. If you’re looking for a similarly-sized (and equally horrific, in a different way) horror game about awful people and capitalism, you can’t go wrong with that.
Joel:
Oh my goodness thank you for featuring Duskpunk! I missed it at the time! Yes, the interface is very nice – my UI person and I had a hard time figuring out how to make the interface both grimy AND clear/slick, but I think we got there in the end.
And here begins a spoilery response to Lorenzo’s spoilery comment. How many more words must a man add to create
Sufficient
Spoilery
Space
I forgot – I did see the eye! But it was much later in the game for me. I wasn’t sure if it was an AI hallucination or a real eye staring in from the porthole. We’ll never know.
I guess I kind of agree with you on the “monster”. The whole game is more about dread than terror and I only had two encounters with The Thing. It never “got” me but apparently you just have to look away from it. There’s the moment when you get out of the vent and it’s literally upon you. I turned around faced the wall and prayed. I was never sure why the AI didn’t come up with a description for whatever hunted down there.
I’m glad you got something out of it like I did. Did you realise there were two endings?
SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS
Oh, yeah, I definitely got something out of it. I’m finding this style of storytelling suited to my tastes, and the writing I found both believable and evocative – a thin line not easy to tread. There’s not much here that strains credulity, and on the whole the station feels like a real place in which people struggle with their work and conscience. The emphasis on everyday conversations I think makes it more digestible when we’re hit (repeatedly) with The Message, especially towards the end.
About the endings: yeah, I realised. Or rather, I noticed that the pods have been programmed with different directions (I think it’s Willow that says so in one of the last messages you read), and after the first ending (towards the hole) I went back to see what would happen if you try to resurface. I wanna say, this second ending is a bit anticlimactic – in the end, nothing happens and you presumably die trapped in the pod. I think the surprise of seeing the world through your “eyes” instead of the visor in the first ending kinda saves it, it’s not super interesting either but the shift in perspective makes you feel the change in atmosphere (heh) a bit better.
A month later all I know is I stopped playing after airlock fiasco because my inability to navigate turned this game into an exercise in frustration. So I watched a video instead and read the article!
My favorite part of the game was the amazing airlock malfunction beat.
I wish I had something more to say because I think the game was really cool.
My God, I’d forgotten Lorenzo’s comment here. So, yes, totally agree on the anticlimax of the second ending. This is definitely one of those titles where the journey is the payoff. I wasn’t disappointed in the endings, it was more that the game had been so entertaining, I don’t know what ending could have been the perfect cherry on top.
Maurycy I loved that you had a go, though. I don’t know if I’d call PROXIMATE an acquired taste but I can definitely see some folks bouncing off the navigation. Thank God you didn’t get to the Dog bit 🙂
@Joel: I am pretty sure if I reached the Dog I’d just throw my steam deck across the room, #noregrets. I really appreciate the game for what it is and I am glad I checked it out, I just have to accept it’s one of those games I lack the faculties to play – which is perfectly fine. My inability to distance myself from the pain of the navigation was so great that until I watched a video about the game I didn’t even realize all of the interesting things that appear on the visor.
Sure, I figured out that “Jam” is actually “blood” but except the head in the toilet and the jumpscare after the vents I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
On a different note this game reminds me a lot of Duskers since they both have the interface being a gimmick.