It Can’t Happen Here: Boreal Tenebrae, Halcyon and Happiness

“Radiating the dreaming eye, of orange linelights and the black sky.”

A while back, someone coined the term “halcyon horror” to me — a shorthand substitute in response to the rise of analog horror, something whose aesthetic has captivated a generation who haven’t (or couldn’t) experience it. The VHS tapes with tracking issues, a childhood tale with an ulterior motive; tropes we’ve seen before, but under a veneer of nostalgia more than most. It’s not about the game being haunted, but the circumstances that brought it to production.

Boreal Tenebrae is, by and large, a horror game for the inverse crowd, one which replaces the fear of an unknown forest with the city that dares to close in. You play as Bree, a young woman whose home town is under great distress after the local mill shuts down, and with it, the town’s source of employment. After a malevolent “static” disseminates the town due to a ritual done by Bree’s sister, Sarah, the townsfolk cause her to disappear, and Bree has to free her from where she’s remained since.

It’s an adventure game, one that firmly sticks a flag in the land of basic progression through the collection of items, combining those items to make more items, and deciphering slightly cryptic dialogue. Boreal Tenebrae isn’t interested in having the player be stuck for long periods of time, which is why item placement is rarely off the beaten path. Not only that, but Bree’s father is a constant reminder of objectives and the direction you need to take in order to progress.

It’s not exactly intricate, but it’s intrinsic to the story that Boreal Tenebrae wants to tell.

Before we continue, it should be stated that Boreal Tenebrae is a must-play, for anyone who has even a vague interest in the independent horror scene. It’s a unique showcase of surrealist brutalism, one that is heightened dramatically through some affecting scenes, scraping sound design, and a uniquely wonderful soundtrack from Guidewires. One that manages to switch between maudlin electronic, squelchy chiptune, and sea-washed ambient without a trip up in transition.

The story in particular revolves around the aforementioned “static”, depicted in-game by hosts that have fallen for its hypnotic buzz. Victims of this static return in the real world as large, mutated versions of themselves, stuck in-between autonomy and entropy. It feels like a loop to engage with them, or even the game’s mechanics, as so much of it involves repetition, which is aided contextually by the narrative.

There’s a lot of ways that the horror manifests in terms of what the player expects from it. One could see it as a nauseating point towards rural machinations, occultic influences that malaise the town from the inside out. Another way is more psychological, speaking to protagonist Bree’s alienation in a spot which she feels she cannot escape. All of this is mainly played through subversion, of which Boreal Tenebrae executes brilliantly.

It’s a very challenging narrative to dissect, one which is embroiled in a wave of personal history and re-conceptions from the developer, Snot Bubbles Productions, otherwise known as Daniel Beaulieu. Originally conceived as an animation project following a grant from Canadian-based electronics company Telus, the following 9-minute short film, Boreal Tales, was released on YouTube with VR-specific utilization, while evolving into the groundwork for an adventure game in the future.

The short film itself is a striking piece of work, refusing to be marred by its seemingly obvious messaging, or the lack of manpower and resources Beaulieu possessed when creating it. Every voice actor that isn’t Bree or Sarah struggles to find their place, but at the same time, they aren’t the showcase, it’s the static itself. Stylized as giant chromatic cubes that swallow people up into their own diffracted universes, there are many ways you can interpret these hypnotizing eye-sores, but an answer must lay somewhere, and Beaulieu sought to find it in a video game space.

As a visual experience, Boreal Tales’ direction speaks to a collage of miscreants, all of whom have backgrounds, and personas which directly reflect the style they inhibit. Bree’s touched up hair and permanent pout, a somebody in nobody’s world, isn’t just content with a town that relies on her, but the knowing that someone who she doesn’t even know relies on her. In Boreal Tenebrae, all of this is shoved through a harsh layer of compression, a 4:3 ratio, and a continuing focus on the degradation.

In an interview with me, Beaulieu states “One thing that I like about storytelling in games is that it allows for a triaging of elements or minutiae of the story”. This is why in Boreal Tenebrae, you are not just playing as Bree, but also Sarah, and mill worker Nicole, and the wandering ghost Fusilier. All occupy the same space, at different points in time, but are connected in what Sarah accomplished, what Bree hopes to finish, and what Beaulieu hopes to communicate through the game.

What is it that needs communicating though? Well, Boreal Tales and Tenebrae, through brief glimpses of bit-crushed home video footage, captures nostalgia, or in this case, a halcyon, in a way most games of its kind rarely do. By now, we’ve all engaged with some form of analog horror, whether it’s web-series like “LOCAL-58”, or lo-fi horror games in the vein of Iron Lung, and Sylvio. While Boreal Tenebrae imitates the style, it’s more interested in context, and establishing its world.

Bree’s croonings in Boreal Tales are now pieces of the puzzle in Tenebrae’s larger world-building, one that is heavily inspired by Beaulieu’s childhood upbringing in the rural areas of Saskatchewan, namely Hudson Bay. “My parents were wildlife biologists. Most of those days were spent in the field and many of those I ended up being brought along”, Beaulieu states, citing various memories of their parents being liaisons to a culture and community that lacked urbanistic prerequisites that would otherwise define known formalities.

It’s not backwards, it’s human.

Moose living in woodsheds. Grouse corpses languishing in large numbers around the local pulp mill. A deer population slowly succumbing to Chronic Wasting Disease. All of these were the context to be invited to a community that Beaulieu was absorbed into, one which would form the identity of Boreal Tenebrae, and like in the game, they watched this rurality wane and dissipate by the powers that be. Victims to eyes on the outside looking in.

Personally, I’ve spent most of my life and time living in rural areas, looking onwards to the scintillating lights of urban jungles in the horizon. Because of this, I look at trips to the city as a joyous event — a sweep of the markets, going out with friends once every few months — yet every time I’m in a crowd, the skyscrapers are always a cold embrace of fear. It’s easy to disconnect despite everyone being here.

It’s all penned into the world of Boreal Tenebrae, while also adding inspiration from lo-fi outsider films, one of those main sources being the Harmony Korine film Gummo. Both are interested in telling the story of an amoral force that afflicted the town, and the answer to both is this capitalistic intent to feed on… anything. Anything, everything, anyone, and everyone, fed images, iconography, and ignorant growth until it all blurs into white noise, feedback, and endless static.

Whereas most horror games would paint the dying forests and lack of streetlights as a monster waiting to close in on you, Boreal Tenebrae blames these monsters on the capitalistic intent to engorge. 100 years ago, skyscrapers were euphemisms for Icarus, and now they paint many a horizon. The static isn’t just a shorthand for feeling stuck, or depressed, but an onset for the noise that presets a new generation of consumption.

It feels intrusive, right? It shouldn’t, but this ceaseless creaking of concrete is a nebulous force not by its design, but by the nature of the people who enforce it. Endless growth, endless agony, something which promises absolution and freedom while also promoting a grinding machine that leaves nothing in its path or aftermath. Sooner or later, your home turns into a memory, and that memory starts to lose focus.

At the same time, the outside world looks so clean. White teeth, tan skin, fast cars, and fitted suits, all of it is transmitted through the veneer of a CRT screen, with which many in the backcountry only briefly glimpse at. It’s a lifestyle to adore, so many nameless voices screaming your name, or even wanting you. There’s a desire for urbanism here, set in stone by the characterization of Bree, who wanes of her being “just static” in this hopeless town.

Is that where Sarah is? Is that where Bree wants to be? You’re trapped in what feels like a dead end, and you just wanna break out and find something in what you’ve been told is a land of opportunity. Maybe you’re established, and you return to where it all began, only to find it’s all changed, or maybe you have. Maybe you’re the monster to these folks, when usually it’s vice versa.

At the time of writing, Beaulieu is situated in the Vancouver area, a far cry from the forests that inspired Boreal Tenebrae. There’s a love for both lifestyles, something which they also acknowledge personally as a “tug of war” in terms of which is more prosperous. To him, what Boreal Tales and Tenebrae are is a lifelong ambition to transcribe an entire lifestyle, an entire form of living which is slowly being washed away, by public perception and fear.

Nostalgia is a scary thing. A source of happiness that is too easy to be immediately shattered by an ounce of retrospection — not exactly cracks that are starting to show, but reading past the happy ending. Halcyon isn’t a desire, but a veneer of comfort to protect you from just how insubstantial life can be sometimes. Tomorrow, it’s your 40th, and you don’t know where the time went.

What Boreal Tenebrae is, is halcyon horror, substituting fear as an entity, for fear as aeternus; an endlessly shifting element to every passing piece of tangible and intangible material you could ever interact with. It’s not that it’s life being life, but rather, a worst case scenario for every perceptible thought. As both Tenebrae and you keep going on, one thing becomes clear.

I don’t wanna go home anymore.