On the Beautifully Broken Boreal Tenebrae
I’m so tired of feeling broken.
I didn’t always feel this way. A sense of purpose was once a bulwark against brokenness. Going to a place every day to work alongside people I liked, feeling like part of something larger than myself, knowing that I was good at what I was doing and that I was a valuable part of the team. These things gave my life meaning.
But for some time now I’ve been adrift. I thought for sure that the work I’d done in the past would open up doors to me in the future where I would continue to be able to do work I believed in, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I sometimes feel like a useless, discarded thing, now obsolete, of use in the old world but too awkward and ungainly for the new, doomed to fall through the cracks in the level geometry and plummet through the gray void below forever. Sometimes I’m afraid now even to write, afraid that anything I write will betray my brokenness, screaming MALFUNCTION! MALFUNCTION! to anyone who reads it.
But is it me that’s broken, or is it a world that can’t find a place for me? And what happens when a whole town doesn’t know what it’s for anymore?
The new game Boreal Tenebrae (previously called Boreal Tales before being changed due to a prior claim on the title) is about a broken town, a town whose sense of purpose is turning to rot. It’s a lumber town in Saskatchewan, or at least it always has been. Now the Toads (yes, literal toads) who run the mill are talking of plummeting profits and moving operations overseas. And for some reason, mysterious blocks of static are appearing all over town.

You primarily play as Bree, a young Black woman whose sister Sarah has vanished. Sarah had a fascination with TV static. When she was younger, she’d done some “static scrying”–trying to find meaning in the snow between stations–and when the blocks of static started appearing in town, she’d returned to scrying as “a way to get to the source of our town’s sickness.” As you undertake Bree’s quest to find her sister (and possibly to save the town), you traverse the world beyond the static blocks on a surreal journey that finds you inhabiting a number of characters in a number of places, most of whom feel, in one way or another, crushed by the town’s economic collapse.
For a young man named Jessie, the terrifying uncertainty of the future looms large, and he reacts with rage to the suffocating squeeze of capitalism, taking a baseball bat to the mailboxes on his suburban street.

For Sam, forming a union seems like the only hope she and her fellow workers have, but how do you convince them to join you when they’re paid so little that they can’t risk losing the jobs that exploit them? Sam’s coworker Nicole needs to keep her job at the mill to support her uncle, whose body is broken by his years on the job and who now relies on an oxygen tank.

The Toads’ exploitation of the workers is so complete that for some of them, even being able to entertain the idea of unionizing reeks of privilege. The mill doesn’t just grind up wood. It grinds up lives. Generations of lives. The game is insightful about how keeping us in economic precarity is just another tactic the powerful employ to get working people to turn on each other as we fight over scraps, rather than letting us come together to find our collective power.
The look of the game, with its hazy polygons, is immediately reminiscent of certain PS1 games, and it’s the perfect graphical style for Boreal Tenebrae’s tone and themes. I’ve long felt that the reason psychological horror games like Silent Hill linger so effectively in our psyches is that the graphical limits of the technology of the time actually enhanced their ability to create worlds that felt ethereal and prone to collapse. The town of Boreal Tenebrae similarly feels like something caught halfway between reality and dreams. Take one step and you might fall right through it.
And indeed, like the town where it takes place, Boreal Tenebrae itself is kinda busted. It’s got lots of little grammar and spelling errors. Some cutscenes didn’t play properly for me. I once walked right off the edge of the world and had to reload an earlier save. It’s not always easy to tell where the game’s deliberately cultivated feeling of brokenness–a fractured reality, a dying town–ends, and where it just being kind of a broken game begins, and if I’m honest, I don’t really care. It all felt of a piece to me, or as if the brokenness of my life was finding its mirror in the brokenness of the game. I’m sure that falling off the edge of an environment wasn’t something the game wanted me to be able to do, and yet when it happened I just thought to myself, yep. That’s how it feels these days. Like I could just fall off the edge of the world.

I won’t pretend to fully understand Boreal Tenebrae. I’m not interested in “getting it,” and I reject approaches to art that treat stories like this as puzzles to be solved. I don’t need to make sense of how all of its vignettes fit together to know that the experience was meaningful and affecting for me, that it said something to me about my own life and my own economic and existential fears, and about how I experience the world sometimes, too: as a fragmented reality where things don’t quite click into place.
Boreal Tenebrae is, to me, a small, sharp little miracle of a game. It feels like a dream at times and then you come across a truth that cuts like jagged glass. It’s unflinching and sometimes bleak but only because it wants to wake us up and make us hope for something more. In its depiction of brokenness, I found both anger at the systems that keep so many of us feeling broken, and forgiveness for myself and all of us who can’t quite figure out where we belong in a world that’s designed to grind us up.
Perhaps I should also tell you that Boreal Tenebrae doesn’t currently have an ending. It’s still being patched and developed, and right now, at a certain point, you get a TO BE CONTINUED screen. But like all the game’s rough edges, this, too, feels appropriate to me. Now is not a time for endings. We’re in a state of flux. We’re at one of those rare moments in history where we can glimpse the possibility of building something new, something better. I don’t know what the future holds for us here in reality or for the people in the town of Boreal Tenebrae, but I do know that if we’re going to create something better, where more people have purpose and dignity and live free of wage slavery and the constant fear of economic ruin, we’re going to build it together.

At least, that’s what the static seems to be telling me.
—
Boreal Tenebrae is available on Steam and itch.io, and as of this writing, is available in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality.
If you’re able, consider kicking me a few bucks to support my work. I could really use the help right now. Thanks.
Notes
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