THE LOST SUN
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED NEXT…
■ Sam Barlow was the director and writer for Legacy Of
Kain: Dead Sun, which ended up being cancelled by Square Enix after around three years in development. His idea was to ignore the convoluted time-travel plot lines of previous entries, and instead pick up on an abandoned ending for Soul Reaver. The finale for that game ends with a cliffhanger in which Raziel travels back through time – but in the original storyline, Raziel would have returned and activated the Silenced Cathedral. This was a giant weapon built by humans that would unleash a ‘deadly hymn’ to purge all vampires across the world.
“I love that ending of actually wiping out the vampires,” says Sam. “So we were kind of doing our version of that story.” Dead Sun would be set many years after this event – but where a devout order of vampires has managed to survive by training their bodies to shift into the spectral realm, something only Raziel had hitherto been able to achieve. “Then one of them leaves the order and becomes an assassin [called Gein],” continues Sam. “So he’s your badass main character that you put on a box with all the shades of grey and everything, but the sleight of hand was [that] the actual main character would be this very cynical atheist priest human [called Asher]. The launching point for the story is he gets killed by this badass spectral assassin, who then consumes his soul – but somehow when this happens, his soul takes over the body of the assassin.
“A lot of the narrative was delivered by having the soul of the assassin still present, and he walks around like a kind of imaginary friend – I think at the time we pitched it as [being like] Number Six in Battlestar Galactica.
“A key part of the storyline was going to be this … woman who was a human concubine to essentially the vampire JFK. He dies in the vampire wars, and she’s pregnant with his baby, which is unheard of because humans and vampires cannot normally reproduce together.” In an act of defiance, she kills herself, but her body does not decay, and she’s kept in a temple and revered as a saint. Asher discovers he has the ability to reanimate people by pulling souls from the spectral realm back into the living world, and he brings her back to life. But as soon as he does, she goes into labour and gives birth to a child who has been alive inside her for 300 years thanks to his vampiric blood. Sam concludes that, “[The child] has developed super-advanced telepathic powers, and has actually been controlling all of the people in this strange monastic order. And he becomes ... the main antagonist.”