I don’t think Severance would necessarily make a good video game, but every episode I watch makes me think games. More specifically, it makes me realise what games do better than every other medium.
Disorientation: it’s a major theme in Severance. From the beginning, we, as an audience, long to know what’s going on. That’s the major compulsion loop in the series, figuring out what the purpose of Lumon Industries is, it’s also the major motivation for the characters in it. What is the purpose of their number crunching? What are they working towards?
What the series does so well, beyond being so well put together, so surprisingly funny and touching and absurd, is withhold information. The whole premise is that you can split one person into two people. You can put a chip in someone’s brain that means they can be one person at work and another outside of it, and that you can keep those two people forever, permanently, apart. One cannot recall details about the other. Separation. Severance.
We experience this disorientation separately in each version of the character: the one who drives to work and drives home, and the one who works at the company and exists in the time between. We follow, in particular, the Innies as they’re called – the people inside the company – as they come to terms with their existence and start to push at the boundaries of it, start to explore corridors they’re forbidden to explore. Start to see, as we do in the game Portal, I suppose, what’s behind the set – what we’re not supposed to see.