The rise of the indie immersive sim

Reports of the immersive sim’s death have been around almost as long as the term itself. And we can’t say they have been greatly exaggerated. From Deus Ex to Dishonored, these are games which operate like a good dungeon master, their fingers steepled behind a cardboard screen. You’re presented with a set of tools, encouraged to improvise and, at their best, your game master rolls with the punches – or lack thereof, as the case may be – to tell a collaborative story.

And yet, for all this focus on breadth of approach, the lineage of immersive sims has remained narrow – a heritage passed down from Looking Glass Studios to Ion Storm to Irrational Games to Arkane Studios, constantly threatening to disappear as it changes hands. With the status of System Shock 3 less clear than ever, and the latest keeper of the light seemingly exploring different avenues with Deathloop, it’s tempting to write the genre’s obituary once more.

“I think immersive sims are harder to make than ever,” says Raphaël Colantonio, creative director of Weird West (pictured left), “because they have to compete on all fronts with triple-A games that are constantly raising the bar.” He should know: as the director on Prey and

Dishonored, Colantonio has plenty of experience with big-budget takes on the genre. But now, with the freshly-founded WolfEye Studios, he’s trying something different. Notably, something smaller, placing the studio’s debut neatly within a new wave of indie immersive sims such as Gloomwood and Shadows Of Doubt.

Weird West is untethering the immersive sim from the firstperson presentation it’s generally been associated with, in favour of a top-down perspective more akin to Diablo. This lets WolfEye compete on all those fronts Colantonio mentions – “story, physics, quest design, action, RPG systems” – with a fraction of the staff.

Shadows Of Doubt’s voxel-based world and the throwback style of Gloomwood are different ways of achieving the same goal, trading visual fidelity for systemic. In Gloomwood’s case, the simple graphics are also a hint to the origins of the game – and, developer Dillon Rogers believes, this new wave as a whole. “We’ve had a hunch for a little while that this was going to happen,” he says. Rogers is part of New Blood, a collective that made its name with Dusk and Amid Evil, games that sat at the forefront of the recent retro shooter boom. “It was only a matter of time before those developers would turn from making games like Doom and Quake to trying to make the more complicated games that followed, like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock 2.”

But does that risk trapping the genre in another dead end? Shadows Of Doubt lead Cole Jefferies hopes not: “I think it’s pretty clear there is a demand for smart, intelligent – and occasionally ridiculous – immersive sims that hasn’t really been catered for yet. Perhaps initially by the fans of the originals, but hopefully by a whole new generation of gamers also.”

For all that Gloomwood wears its inspirations on its sleeve, Rogers agrees. “While we do throw around slogans like ‘it’s Thief but with guns’, it’s actually important to me that we don’t just make Thief again. We want to capture that feeling people get the first time they play a game like Thief.” To that end, Gloomwood is also drawing inspiration from Bloodborne and early Resident Evil. The result couldn’t feel much more distant from Shadows Of Doubt’s detective story, where combat is something to avoid at all costs, or the revolvers-and-spells RPG action of Weird West.

It’s a welcome broadening of approach – and of personnel, with only Colantonio’s team coming out of that tight pre-existing lineage. The only thing the three games really have in common is a shared set of design tenets. As laid out by Rogers: “the deep atmosphere, the sense of place, the feeling that the world is alive and full of interlocking systems.”

“Something that happens organically as a result of game mechanics interacting with each other is ten times more joyous than if that event was scripted,” Jefferies adds. “Although that design philosophy has become part of the modern open-world blockbuster game to some extent, I don’t see why it should be limited to just that. I think there’s a whole bunch of us out there who have been missing that a little, and now the tools are out there that allow us to carry the torch, so to speak.”

“We want to capture that feeling people `^m ma^ Ûklm time they play a game like Thief”