Why Sam Barlow Is Designing ‘Mental Metroidvanias’
“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
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