BAFTA-winning designer Sam Barlow has teased his next two games – one in the vein of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and the other a “very cool” sci-fi horror.
British designer Sam Barlow keeps challenging the conventions of videogames with each project he makes. Known in the 2000s as the creative mind behind Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, he later broke out as an indie developer with the terrific Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality. Those all used live-action footage and cunning user interfaces to create some truly absorbing interactive thrillers; the latter rightly won a BAFTA for its narrative in 2023.
Since then, Barlow’s been quietly working on two follow-up titles, which have recently been given teasing entries on Steam. The first, currently dubbed Project C, doesn’t give away much – there are some atmospheric graphics of a woman’s eye and what appear to be red clouds or smoke, plus a verse from The Bible. A description says the game may contain gore or maybe a bit of nudity, while a coyly redacted bit of text reads “for the first time ever in a videogame”. What does Project C do for the first time ever? We can only speculate.
According to Barlow, who spoke recently to Kinda Funny Games (thanks, VGC), Project C is “in the tradition of Immortality” and is a “sci-fi-horror with a ‘very cool premise’ and features a ‘non-linear space, it’s a cool little puzzle box.'”
It sounds as though Project C will be a live-action interactive adventure, then, much like Barlow’s three most recent games. The other game Barlow’s working on, meanwhile, Project D, is a horror game of an altogether different stripe.
Again, the Steam page linked in the previous sentence doesn’t give away much, but the words ‘survival horror’, ‘1983’ and ‘nurse’ are certainly food for thought. It sounds as though Project D is the one we heard a little bit about last year, though. A job listing posted in June 2023 revealed that studio Half Mermaid was in the process of making a triple-A horror game in Unreal Engine 5, with its ‘experimental narrative’ recalling Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
There are no details of a release date on those Steam pages, so it’s unclear which of these games will emerge first. We’ll bring you more as we hear about it.
