“Occasionally boggles my mind and martian postcards me that 90% of the games that are the critical and popular mainstays of our medium revolve around remote controlling a little toy person about like a human scalextric.”
That’s a tweet from Sam Barlow, founder of Half Mermaid and director of Immortality, posted in late November of last year just a few weeks after The Game Awards nominees were announced. Immortality itself was up for recognition in three categories: best game direction, best performance (Manon Gage as Marissa Marcel) and best narrative. While it deserved nominations for all three, Immortality is a curious contender: even a glance at its fellow nominees in any of the three categories immediately threw into sharp relief just how different Immortality was from any of the competition.
Bluntly: every other game it was up against (and the vast majority of all the other award nominees) is about “remote controlling a little toy person about.” Immortality is, well, not.
Answering the question of what else games can be and how else players can express themselves has been part of Barlow’s mission for his whole career, but especially in games like Her Story, Telling Lies, and now Immortality.
All three games tell a story and facilitate player expression, not by asking them to control a person in a space, but by asking them to use different types of search functions (searching keywords, selecting objects, and sorting clips) to not just uncover an underlying story, but effectively construct what they think the story might be for themselves.
Speaking to IGN the morning after The Game Awards, Barlow compares these works to a Metroid game, but with mental exploration instead of spatial.
“Exploration to me is a really cool thing,” he says. “I get as hunter gatherers, we're just naturally down to have fun exploring and be curious. And the cheesy thing I always get to is these games are essentially taking some of what we would normally do as spatial exploration and then putting that into this big massive video and story. So what I love about [Metroid] games is in making you backtrack, giving your abilities to unlock new layers of different locations and stuff, you create this very vivid mental map of the planet, whatever you're in. And it becomes more real and becomes more interesting. And similarly, when you are playing my games, you start building this mental map of the story and making connections, revisiting clips.”
When you are playing my games, you start building this mental map of the story and making connections.
Barlow admits that his tweet about piloting little guys around was, at least a little, a response to Game Awards nominations being saturated with such games. But the thought also came up roughly around the time of year when codes pour in for various other juries such as DICE and BAFTA, for which the landscape has largely been similar for years. There’s a type of game that’s a shoe-in for the top industry awards, he says. “The proper, expensive games.” That AAA world Barlow has eschewed.
It’s understandable why those “proper, expensive games” all look like this, of course. They’re part of a history of other games about piloting little guys around going back decades, each building upon the previous one’s success. It’s a formula that works, and that people like. “If your game's going to take three to five years to make and it's going to be really expensive, either if you're pitching someone, or even if you're in an internal studio…you have to rationalize that someone's about to spend a huge amount of cash on this game,” Barlow says.
And yet, Barlow has been actively pushing against that “type” with his own work for the majority of his career. Even when he was working on character-driven 3D games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, his goal was to buck convention in whatever way he could.
“At that point, the survival horror genre was so specific and if you were making a horror game, the expectation was there would be health kits, there would be ammo packs…you would hit monsters with pipes and collect a shotgun and solve these puzzles and things. It was so specific. When we made Shattered Memories, we had a mini window because it was for the Wii and that initially everyone was excited about the Wii because they thought it was bringing in all these new people to play games and that every game could sell as much as Wii Sports.
But that gave us this little rationale of having this huge new audience that is normal people that don't know that a horror game has to be exactly like this, because they haven't played Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark and everything else.
“So we slightly tried to push ourselves in everything, like if we were a Martian and we landed on Earth and we watched all the horror movies and read all the horror books and then someone said, ‘Now go make a video game of this.’”
In fact, for all he pushes against it, Barlow also loves dozens of games about piloting little guys. Who doesn’t? He tells me of his early development inspirations, specifically a 1984 game called Deus Ex Machina where players move through the cycle of life, from being a single cell to a very old man, and where all the game’s sound is separated onto an audio cassette to be played alongside it.
He’s long been obsessed with immersive sims, and he fondly recalls the ways in which moving around a space felt incredible in games like Gone Home and, on an open-world scale, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He loves Dishonored. And, of course, he worked on franchises like Silent Hill and Legacy of Kain, both games involving moving little guys around.
“Walking a character around a space is really involved, just naturally it's fun and immersive and involving,” he says. “It's very atmospheric. But how much of the storytelling is actually coming out of this? And to what extent is this just an atmospheric effect?”
Walking a character around a space is naturally fun and immersive...But how much storytelling is actually coming out of this?
Barlow’s clearly spent plenty of time to muse on how much the money and attention poured into games about being characters in spaces has effectively defined what games are as a medium. While many other kinds of games exist, they very rarely gain the same kind of mainstream attention and funding as something like, say, God of War or Elden Ring. Is it worth it, then, for him to continue questioning the status quo with his own work?
“Is looking at it and going, ‘Oh, I can imagine different ways of doing this,’ or ‘I can imagine things that might be more interesting,’ – is that a useful thing to push for? Is that the equivalent of saying, ‘Hey, we should put sound in movies,’ or ‘Hey, movies should not just be people doing plays in front of a camera’? And I think part of that comes from not being completely in that [AAA] world anymore, of being slightly in the indie side of things.”
For now, Barlow has decided it’s still worth exploring – we also talked about how his plans post-Immortality involve either leaning into the character actionness of it all and throwing in a dose of the unexpected, or leaning very, very hard in the other direction.
But either way Barlow’s optimistic that his work occupies a growing space in the games industry where experiments on these themes that have existed for years at the indie level are, slowly but surely, being pit against more conventional blockbuster games. Immortality being in The Game Awards at all is evidence of this. And that hopefully means more room for games that are similarly experimenting with the form to grab mainstream attention.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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