Preview | Imprinted - Are You Hearing Things?
The creaks of the Bakersville house in Resident Evil VII, the metallic clangs that echo through Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation. Even when you know that these sounds play at random intervals and aren’t actually made by an enemy, you can’t help but flinch when they trigger at just the right moment.
Imprinted aims to reverse-engineer this phenomenon by giving you a game in which the horror is the audio. There is no gory imagery or apparitions designed to make you squint right before a jump scare. The audio is most of the story. Its first 90 minutes, which cover two in-game days, serve as a great opener to what I hope will be a cult classic in the OS-simulation genre, and a unique experience for the horror aficionados out there.
The Right People At The Helm
Imprinted developer Cobalt Lane is a German indie studio made up of 12 people, founded by experienced game audio designer and composer Filippo Beck Peccoz, whose credits include Shadow Tactics and Desperados III. In marketing materials, the studio describes the game as a “horror-themed OS simulation”. Think Her Story but focused on analyzing audio clips, instead of video. Like the Sam Barlow works that precede it, Imprinted goes all-in on immersion as a main selling point. Cobalt Lane goes so far as to write the game’s Steam page description and the first paragraphs of the “About This Game” section in-universe.
In the game, you are Vincent Brandt, “an engineer specialised in audio restoration”. You’ve developed ground-breaking software that streamlines the tiresome process of trying to restore damaged audio, a clever in-universe justification for how simple its minigames are. As is the norm with these OS-simulation games, gameplay is basic and essentially boils down to ticking boxes in a to-do list while connecting metaphorical dots.
As Brandt, you are a jaded and depressed man who appears to have a cynical outlook on most things in life. You brush off your friend’s ghost stories, you have an unresolved romance in your recent past, and you are disenchanted with your work, wishing instead that you could focus on your music.
Things take a turn when you’re drawn into someone else’s life. Viola Fossati was an Italian experimental musician who died in a mysterious way. An anonymous client asks your company to recover audio from cassettes related to Fossati in some way, and it is up to you to figure the rest out.
You’ll spend your time deciphering audio tracks that range from haunting melodies to downright creepy recordings, answering emails and messages, and searching obscure forums. Your daily respite is the little time you take at the end of each day to work on your own music, which you have some control over as a player, influencing the short videoclips that play afterwards.
The Horror Of Sound
Sound has been at the heart of horror for as long as we’ve had it in media. The most memorable part of Jaws’ two-hour runtime is its two minute theme; even if you’ve never seen Hitchcock’s Psycho, the shower scene’s shrieking violins will put you on edge; and Kayako’s unnerving croak from Ju-On: The Grudge will stay with you long after the credits roll.
Imprinted utilises this concept expertly. The cassettes that you are restoring are almost entirely enveloped in mystery, so your mind will immediately fill in the blanks with the most terrifying things you can conjure. Add this to the fact that you’ll often hear the segments on loop a few times as you try to complete the puzzles, and you’ll soon feel sweat trickling down your palms.
Play Imprinted with a good pair of headphones, and you’ll frequently pull them out of your ears to check if a sound came from the game or if someone knocked on your door. Was that your cat? Are you hearing things? Have you been diving too deep into the rabbit hole that Viola Fossati likely fell into? I don’t think she was as lucky as Alice…
Spending two days in Vincent Brandt’s shoes left me with a ton of questions and no answers. I’m eager to jump back into Imprinted when it comes out to see the full soundscape surrounding this eerie narrative.
A preview build of Imprinted was played on PC with a code provided by the publisher.
