I want to share a story of the first horror game I played. I tossed the controller and scurried back from the screen, my dad still jokes about it whenever I catalogue to new horror movies I devour ahead of Halloween. But first I need a mea culpa on Duskmourn.

 My initial impression of Duskmourn: House of Horror struggles to be summed up in the written word; lend me voice, if you will, to deliver a prolonged exasperated sigh. We were in the middle of a lengthy break between seasons of Stranger Things, but the inspiration and intent behind Magic’s latest foray into pop culture horror was clear. By rocketing back to the 80s, for an homage to the slasher movies lining shelves of the Blockbuster of my youth, the designers were capitalizing on the nostalgia of players who lived through the era and those who only knew the touch points and symbols that had so thoroughly infected culture by the late 2010s. The 80s had worn out their welcome by the announcement of the horror plane, and Karlov Manor made me uneasy about another genre send-up, so confidence wasn’t high when the early previews began.

There were inescapable references to the Reagan-era teenagedom, snarling jocks and mirthless puns testing my patience and reminding players of a shared set of cultural references, but Duskmourn ended up being a surprising, chilling and deeply loved set. This was not only in the gameplay, which was a top-notch limited environment, but in the depth of the twisting endless hallways of the house.

The plane threatened infinity.

I remember when malls were for people. The academically-beloved designation of the third space was alive and well sharing storefronts with capitalism and a chance to get your ears pierced in any mid-sized city in North America. As consumer habits changed, the combined knock-on effects of ballooning commercial leases and social distancing efforts gutted the strip malls I used to waste hours hanging around in lieu of a purpose. Even the catch-all supercentres that were once the apex predator, the Walmarts and Costcos, are slowing down and showing their age. The promise of Ikea was alabaster refined minimalism. Now there’s scuffs marking up the showroom floor.

Nostalgia has a way of casting a different glow over the sets recently cycled out of rotation. When it was on the horizon, there was a definite chance that Duskmourn would be greeted as a failure. A vocal, nigh-impossible-to-quantify group of critics online predicted that Magic’s latest horror set fall for the worst impulses of the referential and abandon uneasiness for dayglow kitsch. Yet the set’s design team pulled it off. From the gripping story to the memorable haunts and figures lurking in the dark, the set is in my mind one of the scariest in the game’s history.

When we think of totemic works in horror, we all jump to Super Mario 64. In Mario’s first three-dimensional foray players are invited to explore Boo’s mansion. At the impressionable age of six, I would wander the halls of Big Boo’s Haunt, watching the ghosts bob between rooms as the hollow drone the game’s music filled in the air. As a young boy I had an overactive imagination, which was a kind way for my parents to rationalize a son undeterred from cliff jumping but unprepared to watch anything as scary as a mildly spooky episode of Arthur. Yet I was bewitched by Halloween. The goblins and ghosts invading our quiet Ontario town each autumn, held promise of a world that was more dangerous than my own but more fantastic as well. Forget that the seasonal specials I watched through gated fingers left me sleeping with a light on for weeks afterward.

The haunted mansion of Mario 64 was the upper threshold for me, atmospheric more than scary — save for the piano. Tracking down gameplay recordings, the comments were filled with similar engraved memories of players who got too close to the lurking grand and leapt back — whether in the game or in front of their television — as teeth erupted from the instrument and chased us around the confined space. Six was a harsh age to learn the lesson about jump scares.

Zombies and vampires are sentimental favourites of the macabre, but I find a lingering danger in a waiting home far more terrifying. A house is built to be a safe space, your sanctuary from the world and refuge from the dangers and unpredictable elements outside your door. Due to the machinations of the demon Valgavoth, the walls of a single house extend to swallow the plane. There is no separation between the horrors outside and peace within, as the demons have stepped over the threshold, infecting the space within. When Valgavoth grew his world, the familiar signs of domesticity grew alongside side him into crooked malignant aberrations of what they once were. An endless house of horrors in which there is no reprieve.

What worked about the piano in Big Boo’s Haunt was the low polygonal representation of an instrument that was unremarkable in its familiarity. I don’t personally own a grand piano, nor could I play or store it if one appeared on my door, but I trust them. Pianos are on a lengthy list — rarely catalogued but held in every person’s mind — of object that can safely be stored in a home. Yet the first time it showed the ability to walk, you question the safety of the house. This was a Mario game, for god’s sake.

My parents wouldn’t allow me to boot up Resident Evil and wander the Spencer Mansion, but the grounds of Peach’s castle were fair game. If the piano could turn on me, what was next? There was no pooling blood on the ground or unsettling groan emanating from the instrument to warn a player as they walked on by. If it was out for me, then nowhere in the house was safe.

I caught up on this year’s horror movies, an eagerly anticipated October ritual, and took my first step into the endless expanse of the backrooms. Liminal horror is possibly a phenomenon that is outside of my generation — as my YouTube habits dwindled after high school and are mostly comprised of video essays but far fewer rabbit holes. The movie, and the handful of videos I delved into afterwards have stuck in my mind, even if I didn’t find them particularly scary. Yet the world they gesture to, the what-if of liminality is deeply unsettling.

For all it’s incredible artwork, Duskmourn is not an effects-driven visual horrorfest. It has depth, certainly, but it’s the scaffolding of terror, insinuations of a greater evil only glimpsed in the cards, that makes it so effective. We see shadows loom over survivors, dolls with sharpened teeth, but the face is never torn off; no soul is devoured. Magic is a game marketed toward a general audience and even if its history is plenty gruesome, Duskmourn excels at an encroaching horror; the gasp before the scream.

Videogames like Resident Evil and the otherwise cheery Super Mario 64 do the same. They present domestic spaces, furnished in a manner we expect, but the adornments are off. An eccentric’s home teeming with puzzles long before the zombies broke in; or ghosts waiting to greet you, hiding in the walls. If you were to encounter a rotary phone in your walk through Duskmourn, would you answer? The house was once sanctuary but a sickness crept into its walls. We don’t know the extent, or whether it could breach the bounds of the multiverse and find its way into other planes. The dread stays with us when we put down the cards, put away the controller or turn off the screen. The scope is too great, our processors limited. We try to capture the feeling best as we can through pixels and trading cards. The representation is imperfect, but unsettling all the same. We wander through homes furnished in malevolence and we are locked inside, trying to find our way out of endless halls.