Details begin to solidify for Impermanence

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Upcoming narrative sci-fi horror experience about grief unveiled for Windows PC on Steam

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) has become a popular instrument for tracking paranormal noises interpreted as otherworldly voices. The upcoming Impermanence, by Bad Choices Loud Noises and Duckosaurus Games, takes the relationship between sound waves and the spirit world to a whole new level, with all the unforeseen consequences that come with it. 

A scientist still grieving the loss of his son is determined to use his expertise to "reconstruct his son’s spirit through sound." Attempting to "transform a decaying concert hall into a shrine to memory," he returns each night to the long-shuttered Orpheum theatre, setting up equipment and "carrying boxes of toys, photographs, trophies, drawings, fragments of a life, rebuilding [his] son’s room beneath the theatre’s dead stage lights." Convincing himself that science can right an unfair wrong, the man seeks to "use the principles of acoustic levitation to stabilize fragile fragments of presence." Incredibly, he does indeed "begin pulling something back from the static." Not mere EVP recordings, either, as "tiny motes appear in the air [and] echoes answer [his] voice." Could he have truly breached the divide between the living and the dead? Unfortunately for the protagonist, what he didn't plan on was that "something else is listening too."

Impermanence is a first-person, free-roaming 3D horror game, but it's a horror of a very personal, intimate kind "centered around grief, obsession, and the unnatural act of trying to hold onto what should be gone." There are "no monsters waiting in the dark" in this game, only an undercurrent of "tension, decay, and emotional unease" from the knowledge that your efforts have awakened "a greater force: the universe’s need to let go." That's not going to stop you from trying to trap "echoes of life," though. As a scientist, you will "fight entropy through light [and] sound," while as a father you must decide how to build your son's shrine, because "what you place, and where, determines what answers." Your choices will impact which of the multiple possible endings you receive, each determined by "how far you're willing to go – and what you're willing to lose to get there."

There is no firm target release date just yet, but it sounds like Impermanence is on track to launch sometime in 2027, and is now ready for wishlisting on Steam for Windows PC.