Security Booth is deceptively simple game. You’re a guard stationed at the front gate of Nova Nexus, a tech company. All you need to do is talk to people, check their license plates, and either let them in or scare them off. That’s it. In fact, unlocking one of its endings can be accomplished by pressing a button and doing virtually nothing other than responding to phone calls.
On paper, that sounds like a paper-thin experience. How can you draw existential terror out ofthat? Well, that’s ironically part of what Security Booth is going for. The job of a security guard at the front gate isn’t a particularly exciting one. If anything, it’s an impossibly disempowering one.
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Even if you dedicate yourself to triple-checking every license plate and investigating any supernatural event, there just isn’t that much to do. You are, for all intents and purposes, powerless here. There are a variety of endings depending on your choices, but you never really get to know which, if any, have a positive outcome. You aren’t the protagonist of this universe. No one you play as, whether in the main story or bonus chapters, fits that description. You are hopelessly out of your depth, and in the maw of an organization much in the vein of SCP or the FBC, the secretive government agency at the heart of the Remedy game Control.
You’re nameless, faceless. Even if you do your job perfectly, Security Booth mocks you by giving you a generic ‘Employee of the Month’ badge. It’s a permanent fixture in your booth the moment you unlock it. Your sole tangible achievement is a mockery of how little your corporate overlords recognize you as a living, conscious being.
To contrast this, your role is incredibly important to the supernatural beings you interact with. Your booth rebukes them. If you refuse to open the gate, they can’t enter and engage with the chaos unfolding within Nova Nexus’ offices. You, a simple working-class person trying to make ends meet, are the first line of defense against entities beyond your comprehension.
Yet you can never be certain which outcome will result from your actions. In the end, for all that unspoken responsibility, you’re shadowboxing at what you should or shouldn’t do. Meanwhile, when viewing the bonus tapes, while you gain glimpses at the chaos within Nova Nexus, none of it really presents closure. You grasp the risk underlying everything - the sheer power they’re struggling to contain - yet in the end, even the project’s Director is powerless to stop the inevitable. He can’t escape his failures. Nor can the office worker just trying to get out during the catastrophic failure. Or the soul lost bouncing between stations across the multiverse. Hope doesn’t exist for these characters.
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In a larger game, these tales would be told in audio logs and flavor text. Control is full of them. Security Booth puts you in those characters’ lives, experiencing their final moments via VHS tapes as everything goes horribly wrong for each of them. And it’s clear that developer Kyle Horwood is in no hurry to answer the player’s burning questions. Daring to ask and wander inside the building results in a condescendingly mocking dance video performed by the shadowy figure that haunts you. In every was possible, Horwood ensures you’ll never have complete closure.
Everyone in Security Booth is hopelessly disempowered - the booth guard, the director, the station explorer, and you, the player. Security Booth might not be the scariest indie horror, nor the most creative, but it captures the feeling so many are grappling with today - of being helpless, of worrying about wasting your time on tedious tasks, gnawing at questions you might never get a satisfying answer to. All of this leaves us hanging, perpetually, in a state of limbo as we wait for someone to finally say that everything is okay.
It’s not a comforting tale, but it is a laser-focused acknowledgment of the cultural moment. There’s no pretense at having an answer. Not a modicum of solace. Just an absolution in the dread that, at the very least, that we all try, in spite of a dreaded inevitability. Maybe it won’t be enough, but we’ll each remember that we tried.
And the best bit is that you can jump into this corporate nightmare for just$5 on Steam.
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