Sam Barlow, co-creator of Silent Hill Shattered Memories, Her Story and Immortality, told – Game News that a third-person 3D story game he was previously working on could be coming and he could follow suit with Subvert. God of War, Uncharted and The Last of Us.
Speaking exclusively to – Game News, live from this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) San Francisco show, Barlow discusses how the project was initially shelved during Immortality’s development, but may come out of storage.
“It stopped during Immortality,” Barlow explains. “It cannot be paused. With the game being 3D, conceit allowed us to say, “hey, this is a third-person character-based action game.” There is movement in space; there is exploration. But this is not a game where the story is going to be ‘A, B, C’”.
Barlow explains how the no-name 3D game would offer a “non-linear” story, using lessons from Immortality to write and explore the narrative using a different form from recent plot-driven games like The Last of Us and God of War.
“It wouldn’t be like, as I understand it, games like God of War or Uncharted, which are deeply immersed in the idea of movies and stories,” Barlow says. “They have faults of act. They do five acts. And something like Last of Us translates directly to an HBO show, because they treated it like when they did.
“So what was very different about this idea (the no-name 3D game) was to say ‘actually, we don’t need all that.’ The big thing with Immortality and previous games was to treat the story like you would treat the planet in a Metroid game. You don’t experience this planet in a linear fashion. You get to come back to it: you learn from it and learn from it. build a mental model. The interesting thing is in your imagination.”
Barlow also offers finer details on how this game can work, describing how it eschews the typical “branching narrative” structure of some choice-based stories or games in favor of “span”.
“It’s not a branching narrative,” he says. “It’s not about causation. It’s not a plot where you just change train tracks. It’s about having a narrative where you can explore a wide range of content.”
– Game News will bring you an exclusive, in-depth interview with Sam Barlow shortly, covering all of his past work and plans for the future. In the meantime, we’re reporting live from the showroom at GDC, with more news on upcoming games, big reveals and the biggest hits of 2023 on the way.
You can also try out some of the single player games or the best indie games, if you’re a big fan of Sam Barlow’s work.