Clive Barker's Jericho First Look

It's often been said that video games lack the type of creativity and artistic finesse that would put them on equal terms with other forms of visual arts. Now as much as I'd like to dispute these claims, I'm afraid that year after year, money-hungry game publishers and consumers willing to swallow just about every type of mainstream crap that publishers throw at them prove these claims right. So when a truly creative guy like Clive Barker makes a comeback to the gaming scene, a glimmer of hope shines in my heart.

The knight who says "Ni"?

Epic armor?

But why get so excited about a new Clive Barker game? The reason for this can be summed up in a single word - Undying. This Unreal Engine-powered masterpiece has captivated the imagination of many gamers since its release back in February 2001. As Clive Barker's Revelations explains: "The game had been undergoing development for some time before Barker's involvement - DreamWorks already had a partially developed game based on a Steven Spielberg project from way back at the beginning of 1999, but needed some help with the storyline. Overhauls from Barker included the main character getting a complete make-over and changing his name accordingly (from Count Magnus Wolfram to Patrick Galloway). The multiplayer mode (and its attendant spells) was a casualty along the way."

The end result was a phenomenal horror game, one that had the capacity to scare and engage the player emotionally; one of the rare single-player FPS games that attempted to expand the medium, rather than just work within its preset boundaries.

Naturally, as these things go, despite good critical reaction, poor sales have resulted in EA confirming that, "the Undying franchise is dead." Maybe the marketing team at EA didn't do their job properly (or the policy of the company was not to "overspend" on Undying), or it's just a matter of rampant software piracy taking its toll. Regardless, the dying of the Undying franchise dealt a hard blow to gaming as an art form.

So, as you can imagine, I was very psyched to hear about Clive Barker's Jericho - a new supernatural horror FPS that Clive is making in cooperation with the UK-based Codemasters. The Mature-rated title, set for release in fall 2007, will be available for the Xbox 360, PS3 and the PC.

Maybe the best news about Jericho is that according to Barker, he is "involved every step of the way," exchanging drawings and story ideas with Codemasters. So unlike what the case was with Undying, Clive is not coming in at a certain stage of development to offer his creative input; he is actually actively working on Jericho with Codemasters from day one.

Clive Barker's Jericho deals with the mysterious reappearance of a lost city in a remote desert. When a form of evil that goes right back to the dawn of days resurfaces from there, a Special Forces squad, trained in both conventional warfare and the arcane arts, is sent in. Their mission: Hunt down and destroy the evil that lurks at the heart of the city before it destroys humanity. The interesting thing about this is that they are certainly not the first team of "warriors of good" to go into the lost city.

"I don't want to give too much away just yet, but the concept is that somewhere in northern Africa there is a walled city which is not just a walled city but walls within walls within walls," Barker said. "It's like Russian dolls, spaces within each other, and trapped inside each space is a slice of time where the warriors of good have gone against ultimate evil and have lost."

Think of it in terms of gameplay. This "track through time" offers fantastic possibilities in terms of level design, ensuring that the gameplay stays fresh throughout the single-player campaign.
The first battles encountered on the quest are against relatively modern imprisoned soldiers, while further in are World War I infantrymen, Crusaders and other warriors, each drawn from an earlier historical era than the last.

"Players will constantly be given new challenges, new environments, and yes, new horrors and abominations to face every step of the way," explains Barker. "However, unlike a conventional game in which the characters are attempting to escape at the end of their ride through Hell, our protagonists have a much more difficult task. The closer they come to the end of their trek into darkness, the nearer they get to the source of that darkness: Evil Incarnate, we'll call it for now..."(I'll call it Celine Dion -Mo)

"It becomes a more primal experience as well, because the means of combat become more crude and the people become in a way simpler," he continues. "I think the player is going to get quite a series of spectacles because they get closer to something that makes the devil look like Pollyanna."

All of us here at Action Trip are thoroughly excited about Clive Barker's new project. If what he offered in Undying was only his limited input, then the stuff in Jericho will be every horror fan's dream come true. Or nightmare come true for that matter.