496 Words About: The Enduring Horror of Sledge’s Safehouse
I mentioned in a previous essay that I’ve started playing the first Borderlands videogame with my girlfriend, and, as of this writing she’s become obsessed. This is fun for me because it’s given me an excuse to replay Borderlands and remember why I loved it when it first came out. Recently her character reached the mission where they have to find the key to the mines that’s hidden in Sledge’s Safehouse, and after listening to her talk about it I decided to play it myself with her playing backup.
Sledge’s Safehouse was always creepy, and two decades later it still is.
The mission takes place inside of an abandoned corporate installation, a familiar location for most of the Borderlands games, and the level is set up as a maze of hallways, corners, and industrial infrastructure. Rusted and battered pipes jut out from walls, stacks of garbage fill the corners and floors of rooms, piles of skulls are left on decrepit and rickety shelves, a mutilated corpse lies on a table with a steel bolt protruding from its neck, and the hallways are littered with graffiti that are often incomprehensible scribbles.
I remembered these details, but what I couldn’t forget are the sounds.
The background music of Sledge’s Safehouse is a series of low rumbles interrupted every few seconds by uncanny string instruments. Besides the sheer discomfort this track creates, the player is greeted immediately by the sounds of Bandits who are either taunting the player, or psychos who giggle and cackle waiting for me to appear around a corner. The labyrinthian quality of the level design makes it so that moving just an inch can trigger enemies to become aware of me and before I even have time to recover and regroup from the last fight there are swarms of npcs attacking me.
A broken Claptrap lies nearby, crying and pleading for help, and while this overly dramatic sound is portrayed as funny, it only further builds a discomforting atmosphere.
Eventually I enter a large arena where I fight a massive “Roid Rage Psycho” who is three times my size and acquire the key. Typically this is where the conflict would end, but now I have to fight my way back through the maze. And there are more cackles echoing from the dark.
Borderlands as a series became known for its unique brand of irreverent humor, and there is plenty of it in the first game. But hindsight and reevaluation has allowed me to see how the first game was as much about the horror of Pandora as it was about making players laugh. Sledge’s Safehouse is designed to attack the player’s perception and challenge their conviction to move forward. It’s also a reminder that Pandora is a planet full of broken people.
Between the eviscerated corpse left on a table, and psycho’s giggling and growling off camera, I remembered that Borderlands skirted the line between action-adventure and horror.
And sometimes it just was horror.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
7.1.2024
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