When I started Horrify.World I had 2 goals. One of them was to support indie horror games by promoting them and their creators on the site and give them whatever little exposure I could.

Usually that means playing a lot of hot garbage. Most of what comes across our desk are first time projects by first time developers, and they’re full of first-time project first time developer growing pains, and that’s alright, because the only way to get better is to create, and the only way for us to support them, is to play them and give feedback….

But it does make it more shocking, and it does make it more pleasantly surprising, when you start playing something, and it absolutely blows your socks off.

WHAT IS IMPERFECT

Imperfect opens as we the player, are trapped inside a van going somewhere. It’s clearly some conspiracy nuts base of operations, but whether we’re the conspiracy nut or the base belongs to the mysterious voice that speaks to us in a 2000’s movie trailer esque way, is unknown….

And before we can make much of the situation, the van gets run off a cliff, and we fall into the depths below, but not before making eye contact with a young woman standing on the edge of the road we were just on.

A lot of games will call themselves inspired by Silent Hill, and a lot of games will try to emulate the surface elements of that franchise. Imperfect doesn’t call itself anything like that, it doesn’t feed us a familiar story from one of the games, and there is no fog to be found here, and yet it manages to effortlessly capture the uneasiness that makes Silent Hill special.

And nowhere is that uneasiness better showcased than this hallway where we walk from one end to another, and out of the corner of our eye, and in the shadows, someone, follows.

As we make it to the end of the hallway we enter out into an open cavern, and here we get a taste of what will be the games signature graphical style, which we will talk about in just a minute, but let me tell you about this mirror we just picked up first.

There will be a few different mirrors in the game, and they will
each have different functionalities.

This one here can be used to reveal things that can’t be seen with the naked eye, which will both tell the story of the game, but also reveal the way forward, sometimes literally making a platform appear. And it also has the functionality of a hint system, and can with a button press, be flipped around which will reveal a message on the other side, hinting at what the game wants the player to do next.

We use the mirror to reveal the woman from the road earlier, and we find a door that doesn’t look like it belongs in a cavern, and inside it looks more like someone’s bedroom, and then the voice from the van comes back.

If the books are anything to go by, this room definitely belongs to the person that owns the van we were in earlier, and it’s still not clear if that’s us, or the voice speaking.

Shadows appear on the walls along with the flashes of police sirens, and then the door opens…. which janked me out of the experience of playing this game for a moment, because it reminded me that I was playing a game and that this was a game, something I hadn’t been consciously aware of until now. I had plunged into the experience together with the protagonist when the van went off that cliff.

Beyond the door is a large cavern, and here I googled Gustavo Doré and understood everything. I will tell you about it later but let me first tell you about the second mirror, the square mirror.

We’ve seen little monster men here and there, but they’ve remained more or less passive, but now that we’re delving deeper and deeper into the system of caverns, they’re becoming more aggressive.

See there are these pools, and these pools hold a liquid that we can use to power these ancient generators of a sort that can be used to lift up columns and other pieces of debris blocking paths ahead of us, or be used to create platforms.

The little monster men don’t like that, so we use the square frame to reveal them, and they like that even less, because focusing on a monster man with the frame for long enough, kills it, or makes it go away or whatever.

And now I can tell you about the Doré connection, because as we make our way through the passage that was just collapsed moments before, we come across a van like the van from before, and we get run over by it and plummet into the dark water below and it seems like we’re chased by something and we try and escape…

Gustave Doré was a 19th century printer, and we greated these very unique illustrations using a print techqniue called wood engraving, and they’re also what gives the cave walls in the game such a unique look, because the developer has sampled Doré’s illustrations as textures.

But Doré didn’t just illustrate everything and nothing, he’s most known for his dark depictions of biblical imagery, especially the ones depicting hell…. and…. The visuals of the cavern now makes sense, the sound bytes of what sound like a car crash and someone drowning, and the interiors and the objects that don’t belong in the cave.

We’re dying and we’re journeying through the underworld going somewhere, and on the way there, we’re being confronted with our past, our sins, everything… and that’s why this game screamed Silent Hill me from the very first minute, because it perfectly replicates that. The journey of some asshole getting what’s coming to them, and being confronted by the sins of their past.

And I knew I had to sit down with the guy behind this game and ask him about it. So I did.

MEET THE GUY WHO IS MAKING IT

Randalf: Alright, first off, who are you and where are you from?

Walter Woods: I’m Walter Woods. I’m a game designer from Savannah Georgia. I was originally an architect before I moved to game design. Imperfect will be my second shipped title. It is solo developed.

I think being trained as an architect gives me a unique way of telling stories using spaces, history, and perspective. A lot of that is in Imperfect.

R: Yeah you have developed VR games before? I came across a reference to a Soft body studios?

W: I have. That was a short lived project but very interesting. A short form VR experience that uses a similar art style to Imperfect. I also used to do commissioned VR work for companies.

R: So how did you go from being an architect to working in games?

W: I got so deep into architectural visualization that I started using game engines, and I just kind of fell into it. Then I happened to meet a brilliant coder who helped me along in that aspect. We had a studio together while I was an architect. We were working on games and vr experiences. I went full time into games eventually. Never looked back. It was all the great things about architecture but with more creative control and expression.

R: Sounds great. I used to design whiskey packaging and there was a lot of math and not a lot of drawing

W: Haha exactly

R: When the game opens up, there is an narrator and he speaks like the narrator does in Alan Wake. Is that inspired by that game or is that from somewhere else? And where is that from because it sounds so familiar and it's been bothering me for 12 years

W: Hahaha the Podcaster is a fun way to tell the story of the game from an outside perspective. Over the course of the game he will be investigating and proposing theories based on his discoveries and surveillance and become embroiled in the events himself. The player will be left to draw conclusions from there. He is inspired by my love of conspiracy and mystery podcasts. My good friend voices him and does a fantastic job.

R: Oh yeah stellar voice acting. It instantly hooks you and you know exactly what the vibe of the game is going to be.

I watched your game dev talk where you showed off how you made the textures for the game using Doré's illustrations, and after reading up on him, I can see how the game isn't just visually inspired but also narratively inspired. It has that Dante's Divine Comedy thing going where you're descending into the bowels of something that might be hell because you need to confront something about yourself. But then on the other hand you have this cast of conspiracy enthusiasts? When I was looking through that room in the beginning where you can look at the different books, I was reminded of those outsider types from high school that hung out in the parking lot. What's the inspiration there?

W: Essentially I want the player to be fielding a lot of theories of why they are in this place. The podcaster will have his opinions, and the player will have their experience. But also Dora, the woman who stalks you throughout the first bit of the game, she has her own story to tell.

R: oh so the player isn't looking for her but being stalked by her?

W: Maybe stalked is the wrong word. I’ll be a bit mysterious and say they “we’ll see” haha

R: alright, you keep your secrets…. I'm guessing you're also not gonna tell me who Samuel Judge is

W: I’ll say it’s the player, but the larger question of who we are is tricky to answer.

R: Interesting

R: The demo I played is annoyingly good and I want more and now. It scratches an itch I havn't quite felt since maybe Silent Hill 2. When do you think it will be released?

W: Haha thanks! The full demo with more features, fear, and story will be coming for free in October during Steam Next Fest. The full game will be next year probably Q3

R: Looking forward to it, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me

W: Thanks so much! Let me know when it’s up.