Editorials
[Interview] ‘Lost In Vivo’: How a Secret That Can Only Be Discovered At Midnight Came To Be
Lost In Vivo is a first-person game that deals with having crippling claustrophobia. During a rainy day, your service dog gets lost into the sewer system beneath the ground, and you have no option but to follow your partner into such a dark, humid, and terrifying environment. The game portrays its fear to the player in a place between reality and psychological horror, and as you might expect, things start to get obscure really fast for the character.
Wrapped in a PSX-like art style, Lost In Vivo takes heavy influence from the Silent Hill series, and it quickly shows up more complex systems: different weapons, an inventory system, puzzles, and backtracking are only a few.
But there’s something way more different happening if you boot up the game at midnight. As Dillon Rogers, developer of Gloomwood pointed out on Twitter, there’s a literal “Midnight” mode that turns the experience into a completely different game, showcasing unique weapons, a dungeon and unique goals. It’s in the same vein of what you’d expect from a Bloodborne chalice dungeon. But how did this come to be? And under what purpose?
The project made its first big public presence in 2016’s Kickstarter campaign, which got funded right on time before the deadline arrived. Right until not so long ago, when the game released on itch.io and then arrived onto Steam recently, Akuma Kira spent most of his time developing the game almost by himself and apologizing to his backers for the lack of updates during long periods of time.
“It was difficult at times working mostly by myself. There was certainly slow uninspired periods where I mostly did programming work, but also there were times when I felt overjoyed to be able to work on something this big. During the first half of Lost in Vivo’s development I was still taking online classes, and progress was certainly slower during that period,” Kira said. He’s a 26 years old developer who obtained a bachelor’s degree in Game Design in 2017.
Diving into horror wasn’t something new since his past smaller projects such as Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion and S.I.N. had a huge focus of mixing eerie designs with otherwise cute elements. For Lost In Vivo, though, Kira had a clear set of influences to draw creativity from the game design of Silent Hill 4, the art style of Silent Hill 1, and the creature design of recent games like Bloodborne.
Additionally, there’s a clear resemblance to the PlayStation X era in pretty much everywhere, from promo arts such as the 3D case model on Lost In Vivo’s itch.io page to a warning message about violent content right when the game starts. “Some of my favorite PSX games would be Silent Hill, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, and that terrible Vampire Hunter D game.”
Kira expressed that living in Murphy, North Carolina, certainly affects his work as well. “I mostly just find my town a bit depressing, but there are some interesting decrepit buildings and abandoned collapsed farmhouses that give me more inspiration for things like the area in Lost Tape #3,” he added, referencing additional levels that can only be accessed through tapes, reminiscent of Resident Evil 7 and Paratopic.
But in creating the “Midnight” mode, which portrays a different game altogether for just one hour based on your local time, there were two clear influences from the start: Dante’s Inferno and Bloodborne. Keep in mind that there are small spoilers to follow.
Kira included the midnight mode concept in a very early draft of Lost In Vivo, with the addition of one if the gamma was turned all the way down and one if it was all the way up. While it was always thought as a secret, there’s a small hint in the final version: a poster with a clock set to midnight with the caption “See you there”, and that’s the only clue players get.
“Midnight mode and the base game are somewhat related. This is a bit of a theory/story spoiler but they are both different attempts at a journey through Dante’s Inferno. In the base game you only travel through the seventh circle, and in Midnight mode you pay your way out with 30 silver coins,” Kira said. “I was really inspired by the chalice dungeons in Bloodborne and wanted to make a game that was just like it but with more focus on a randomized dungeon.
Without getting into programming specifics, the way it works is with a command that takes public variables in Windows computers, such as the time and date. By using “System.DateTime.Now.Hour”, the game is able to check if it’s midnight or not. “There’s also a note in the game that says it was written on the current date using the same command, and some fake credits that add your name as ‘Motion Capture by: (Whatever the player’s computer is named).’”!
As for current and future projects, Kira said he’s working on a DLC for Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion called The Doll House, and another one in Unity that is yet to be named. Lost In Vivo was his first attempt to work in a project of this scale using 3D models, and aside from fixing bugs and adding more secrets, he said he would be interested in doing a DLC for it in the future. “I also want to do more commision work and design for games that I’m not leading because I think it’s a lot less stressful,” he said.
“There is a lot of horror media and games that seem like they have secrets, [but] they use vague symbolism or references to tease like something is hidden within them. I wanted to do this as I usually do with my projects, but actually, have something substantial to find in the end.”
Lost in Vivo is available now on Steam.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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