A new horror-game announcement pretty much always intrigues me, but when a studio reveals a game that’s said to kick off a whole new connected horror universe, that’s the type of ambitious first step that really grabs me. Such is the case with ProbablyMonsters’ upcoming first-person horror game, Ire: A Prologue.
As the name suggests, Ire: A Prologue is the very beginning of the Ire universe–a brand-new series led in part by CJ Cowan, who previously worked as story lead at Bungie and helped bring to life the years-long sagas of both Halo and Destiny. Cowan’s expertise is in expanding worlds such as the one Ire is set to unveil, but it all starts with this first game, which, based on my hands-off demo, will intrigue fans of games like Alien: Isolation and Amnesia.
In Ire: A Prologue, players take on the role of a young girl named Emily who, in 1986, finds herself trapped in a timeloop on a boat while a monster roams the halls. Like in Alien: Isolation or the most recent Amnesia sequel, The Bunker, the monster is an AI enemy and not adherent to a script. This means every interaction can go any number of ways, and since you’ll be looping through its world over and over, there’s every reason to believe you’ll repeatedly need to outwit the creature by hiding in lockers and vents or staying in the shadows as it lingers nearby.
In my demo, I loved catching merely glimpses of the beast, which seems to be a wholly original monster the game’s story referred to as the Drüdgen. Cowan told me the team was inspired by things like 1979’s Alien when it comes to hiding its central monster, thereby making it more fearsome.
“The more we hide the monster, the more we can really scare the player. But also [we can] put our calories into the important parts of the game. And so we ended up building a bunch of complex systems around that, where the monster turns off lights within its radius, and even turns off your flashlight if it gets too close. And so you start using those as clues as to where the monster is. You know, when you see a light go off at the end of the hallway, you know the monster is about.”
While I hardly caught an image of the creature, what really grabbed me were the strange sounds it made. They’re hard to describe, but the way I spoke of them to Cowan was that it sounded sort of like the monster was gargling or drowning. Cowan revealed how a particular source inspires those sounds. “The initial inspiration for the audio of the monster was the bear from Annihilation,” Cowan explained, referring to Alex Garland’s 2018 film. “It’s some really cool, kind of vocal stuff where it was almost trying to speak. There’s some fun stuff [later in the game] where it starts mimicking Emily’s voice, talking back to her.”
I found it an interesting choice to declare this game as the first part in a more expansive universe. I wondered what the advantages of that approach are, which Cowan spoke to as someone who has gone down both paths past that figurative fork in the road.
“If you look at the people on the team and the experience that we have, we’ve done a lot of franchise-building in our past work, going from Halo 2 to Halo 3 to ODST and Reach. Everyone would like to think we had big plans, and had the entire arc of Master Chief [laid out]. That wasn’t the case. We would finish the game and then be like, ‘Okay, well, what happens next?’ You know, we try to figure it out ourselves.
“And this is something that the leads on the team are super passionate about, building a franchise and slowly peeling back the layers of that franchise over time and digging deeper and deeper into it. And so there’s a lot in this game that are seeds for what comes next. And I’m super stoked about that.”
Cowan smirked as he shot down my follow-up question regarding whether Ire will be an anthology or one continuous storyline–“I’m not gonna spoil that!”–but he did mention how the hub space Emily will routinely return to becomes sort of a safe zone where players can look into items they’ve found on their journey, such as cassette tapes and photographs. It seems to me that these items, perhaps among other aspects of the story in Ire: A Prologue, will serve as the breadcrumbs for players to follow if they want to make sense of Ire both in this first game and in games that will follow.
Ire: A Prologue will kick off its wider story universe when it arrives just in time for Halloween, October 28, on PC. A free demo will arrive on Steam a bit sooner on October 13.
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