r/ImmersiveSim

I'm currently working on a game concept that blends Immersive Sim and Survival Horror elements. The world-building is heavily inspired by the Blame! manga, meaning you'll be exploring a vast, desolate Megastructure.

Regarding level design, I’m aiming for a non-linear, Metroidvania-style exploration. However, I want to double down on the Immersive Sim side by having different environmental elements interact with one another in systemic ways. The core gameplay revolves around mastering a single, singular weapon while maintaining high interactivity with objects in the world.

In short, it’s a horror-focused, non-linear experience where the environment and gameplay systems are deeply intertwined. I’m currently prototyping these mechanics in pieces to see how they synergize and, most importantly, if the loop is fun.

What do you think? Is this a genre mashup you'd be interested in playing? Does this sound like a concept worth pursuing?

https://preview.redd.it/k8ixi7icup0h1.jpg?width=2838&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ac6409b1a778cdc7fe030c2b44f54d0923d32cad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agqqjUd2bIY

IGN are at Ghost Story office from the background, could be a preview coming somewhat soon?

Some background, I really enjoyed the Arkane games from all Dishonored games to Prey and Deathloop. I think I heard that Weird West is by OG devs who departed from Arkane or something like that.

I tried out the game a bit ago for about an hour and while the world was interesting, the gameplay felt oddly rigid and unresponsive to me. Characters being locked into animations and enemy detection often not really being clearly defined. I think it’s an issue with me and the isometric view of the game.

Then I hear about a first person mod that changes the experience and I’m curious if it’s worth getting back into.

I mean like a mostly-unused setting in terms of style, culture, architecture, visuals, etc.

I would love a cold-war spy thriller immsim 😄

All I see on here is people arguing about which games an imm sim and which isn’t and people on both sides arguing defending their game, why doesn’t a mod just pin the definition of a imm sim with some examples in it cus that’s literally all I see posted here.

I still don’t entirely understand what it is because some fella will have 50upvotes saying something a imm sim then fella 2 will have a rebuttal and it’ll also have 50 upvotes. Cyberpunk Phnatom Liberty isn’t an imm sim but feels just as immersive as deus ex imo and both games have same type of main objective that u have to do but one gets called an imm sim one doesn’t I don’t get it, some missions in deus ex u have to go to and talk to said person or kill them and same in cyberpunk but then both have parts where u can not kill them (gig in CP77 guys in trunk of ur car and u can choose what to do is that not the definition of imm sim?).

In DXHR you have the gas to kill prisoners or the science team or u choose to blowup vial and do neither feels pretty similiar to some cyberpunk side missions/gigs. So a good pinned definition by a mod cus I assume they know the most considering they made a subreddit dedicated to it would do wonders.

Immersive sims often give players many possible approaches, then reward one route for being cheap, safe, and repeatable.

The system still has breadth, but the player no longer has much reason to touch most of it.

The design question I keep circling is what happens when that reliable solution still works, but leaves damage behind.

You can keep taking the safest route, but a faction starts to recognize the pattern.

You can keep using the strongest tool, but the local economy or access layer shifts around that repeated use.

You can solve the immediate problem cleanly, and afterward the world-state is narrower than it was before.

The player is not blocked. The run continues. The question is whether that still reads as agency, or whether it starts to feel like the game is grading every choice against a hidden ledger.

For people who think about immersive sims as systemic spaces, where is the line?

Does repeated optimal play becoming costly make the system feel deeper?

Or does it make experimentation feel unsafe?

I am especially interested in cases where the game does not reset the damage. The player has to keep inhabiting the altered state and recover through whatever systems are still available.

I’ve been sitting with the reveal a bit and wanted to share some thoughts now that there’s more to go on with this new vid.

As previously mentioned here on the sub a couple days ago, the game director explicitly names Deus Ex, along with Bloodlines and Baldur's Gate 3, when talking about how objectives work. The example he gives is getting into a building sealed as a crime scene, where you can go over the fence, hack the keypad, find the code in a note, or get it from someone who knows more than they should, and what strikes me about it is that he describes them almost casually, like they’re obvious, which tells you something about what the team internalized from those references.

When getting caught while sneaking the game won't reset, it will change into an action setup instead. That is the kind of detail that separates games that say “multiple playstyles” from games that actually mean it, and as Łatocha says, the approach is meant to support force, stealth, or mind, with different solutions to the same problem.

That said, and I want to be honest here, this is still a World of Darkness game first. The skeleton is the new 5th edition Hunter rulebook, and Łatocha says as much in the Xbox article. He also says they followed a lot of the book’s rules, with attributes, skills, advantages, and flaws carried into the game. So there is a window for questioning whether the ImmSim stamp is load-bearing or just decorative. VtMB had the same tension, and we still argue to this day about where it lands around the genre.

My gut says that it is well-established as ImmSim-inspired, maybe ImmSim-adjacent if it truly delivers on what is being described. But I am genuinely curious to see whether the tabletop foundation ends up grounding the systemic design or constraining it.

These guys from Teyon are successfully outrunning their tainted past, they made Rambo: The Game, one of the absolute worst licensed IP games ever made. Terminator: Resistence and Robocop are both fun games, so at least "fun" may be guaranteed from Hunter.

The game will just come out by summer of next year, so there is plenty of time to be wrong about this.

Noirmancer is an in development supernatural stealth game in which you use powers like the ability to turn to mist, shrink tiny, and erase memories to infiltrate businesses and investigate the secrets they're hiding.

Rock Paper Shotgun: Thief, Dishonored and Philip Marlowe combine in Noirmancer, a stealth sim that lets you wipe minds with a snap of your fingers

Noirmancer on Steam

Noirmancer (Alpha Demo) on Itch.io