Sam Barlow, creator of Immortality, has revealed some details about his new game in a job posting for a lead level designer.
Sam Barlow, the creator of Her Story, Telling Lies and the BAFTA-winning Immortality, has posted an advert for a lead level designer at his studio Half Mermaid, revealing a few details about the developer’s next game in the process.
We already knew that Half Mermaid’s next title would signal a move away from the FMV format of the studio’s previous titles (“It looks like probably the next project will be 3D,” he told us in April), but thanks to the job posting we now know it will be a third-person horror title made in Unreal:
“The project is a third person horror game with experimental narrative, a return to the genre that Sam previously explored with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Candidates with experience of shipping a third person Unreal title on console are preferred. We’re combining AAA experience with indie agility to deliver a big, ambitious game and are assembling a small team to make it happen. You will be joining the project for early ideation and setting the tone with hands on design work to establish the game’s world.”
Barlow later confirmed the studio is using Unreal Engine 5 in a tweet: “The game is in Unreal 5 and we’d love to find someone who has a passion for architecture, lived spaces, modernism, 20th Century design; is obsessively weird and isn’t squeamish about breaking players’ minds.”
Sam Barlow designed and wrote the 2009 Wii game Silent Hill: Shattered Memories while he was at Climax Studios in the UK. The game was lauded for its unusual approach, where a psychiatrist asks you questions, and then the game changes based on your responses. Barlow later worked on Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun at Climax, which was cancelled by Square Enix after years in development. He then went solo to release Her Story in 2015, later forming the studio Half Mermaid.
From the sounds of it, the latest game will mark a return to Barlow’s horror-game roots, but with the spangly trappings of the latest version of Unreal. Can’t wait.
Read more: Immortality | Creators and stars discuss the game’s hidden secrets
