Sam Barlow – the developer behind acclaimed investigative FMV adventures Immortality, Telling Lies, and Her Story – has announced he’s working on two new horror titles, including a third-person survival horror said to be for old school Barlow fans “that played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories back in the day.”
Listings for Barlow’s next two projects, to be developed at his Half-Mermaid studio, initially surfaced on Steam. However, as was the case with Immortality’s first tease, both pages are heavily redacted, only offering up snatches of legible text and a couple of woozy mood videos.
First, there’s Project C, teased with some biblical verse from Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Between the redacted words that follow, we can see it’ll be a “new cinematic” something
As for Project D, this “survival horror” gives us the words “1983”, “nurse”, “in”, “Be careful”, and “nightmare”. And if that’s not enough to tantalise, we also get, “Something bad… Some doors… Some doors… home?”. Beyond that, there’s a smattering of abstract imagery included with both games – and could the recurring eye motif perhaps hint at a connection between the two?
Thankfully, Barlow didn’t just leave it at that. Shortly after Project C and D made their enigmatic Steam debut, he spoke to Kinda Funny Games, revealing a little more about each one. According to Barlow, Project C (as transcribed by VGC) is “in the tradition of Immortality, building on some of that tech but going in a cool direction”. It’s a sci-fi horror with a “very cool premise”, and features what might be “the chunkiest mechanic we’ve come up with within this kind of non-linear space, it’s a cool little puzzle box”.
Project D, meanwhile, is “for my old school fans that played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories back in the day”. It’s described as a third-person survival horror game, “but like, take that and then imagine what happens if the Immortality team fuses with a third-person survival horror game.” Shattered Memories, if you’re unfamiliar, released in 2009, reimagining the original Silent Hill in a big way; it was a bit of an underappreciated gem and would be lead designer Barlow’s final release at developer Climax Studios before going solo to work on Her Story.
Barlow has offered no clue as to when we might hear about Project C and Project D in more detail, but it took almost two years for Immortality to get a proper reveal following its initial redacted tease – suggesting we might be in for a bit of a wait.
News of Barlow’s latest projects arrives alongside the PS5 release of his 2022 Hollywood horror Immortality, which Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell called an “epic mystery of self-reference and cinema” and an “elaborate, ingenious enigma” in his Recommended review.