ven though we don’t have an award for Videogame Moment Of The Year, if such a thing existed we’re confident our choice would match plenty of other critics’. Yet none would describe it in the same way, since this moment arrives at a different time and place for every player. We know someone who stumbled across it within half an hour; another didn’t encounter it for three or four. The common factor, always, is surprise. It’s been a long time since a videogame made us gasp in shock; longer still since we have received so many messages from excited, unsettled friends and industry peers, the majority repeating the same three-word refrain: what the fuck? From a feverish exchange of DMs with a former colleague, through several all-caps texts from a current one, to an extended back-and-forth with someone we hadn’t seen in six months, it’s a moment that has had everybody talking – yet surprisingly few giving the game away in public.
But, in keeping with Immortality’s non-linear structure, we’ll come back to that later. Instead, let’s rewind to the moment the first seeds were planted. Director Sam Barlow was working on Legacy Of Kain: Dead Sun at Climax Studios when, in 2012, publisher Square Enix decided to pull the plug, leaving him to strike out alone. But those three years spent making a game about vampires would not be in vain; in trying to find a fresh take on the mythical bloodsuckers, Barlow and writer James Smythe devoured every piece of vampire fiction they could find. “I had a lot of vampire stuff in my head that one day might be useful,” Barlow says.
After departing Climax, but before settling on the project that would become 2015’s Her Story, Barlow toyed with the idea of a firstperson horror game, one whose aesthetic represented an architect’s visualisation of a building – albeit one with non-Euclidean elements to discover. “It had that element of a found object,” Barlow explains. “One of the mechanics was that you could look at an object, and because it was 3D, we could seamlessly match cut to that object, but in a different situation – so you’d zoom in, and then when you zoomed out, you’d be somewhere else. But I decided not to make that game, because it felt like I was making too many decisions that were indie compromises.”
Barlow’s games have a fragmented chronology, and his mind tends to work in a similar way. He suddenly recalls something that takes us back even further, to just after the 2009 release of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, at which point Climax was approached to make a Clive Barker game, based on the horror author’s Books Of Blood anthologies. To which Barlow pointed out that the Books Of Blood stories were wildly varied – “it wasn’t just dudes walking around empty schools or whatever” – and it would be too expensive to make for the proposed budget. So Barlow and team offered a counterproposal, which got as far as the prototype stage.
“It was like, imagine if Clive Barker was making a videogame in the ’80s and something went wrong. And this game had been lost to time,
