Now she’s making an immersive sim of her own.

You play as a Soviet agent tasked with infiltrating and fomenting revolution in a fortress city called Hiwatha.

Tucci wantsSpectrato meet the criteria players will expect from an immersive sim.

Cultists gather around an alter in a screenshot from Gloomwood.

“To me, the immersive sim is the platonic ideal of the video game” she says.

It sounds like everything immersive sim fans want.

But there’s one big difference between Spectra and the games that inspired it.

A neo-retro set three-walled TV set of a kitchen with bright cabinets and a yellow fridge, from immersive sim Spectra

Tucci is making it on her own.

This isn’t coincidental either.

The way history has repeated itself is uncanny, but it’s also a little portentous.

An entrance to a building with a CRT computer and colourful letters on the wall reading Lindbergh, in immersive sim Spectra

Commercially speaking, immersive sims don’t share the same track record for success that shooters do.

“It’s the video game genre [equivalent] of the Ring videotape,” Rogers says.

“You make an immersive sim, and then you die several years later.”

A cloaked warden with green glowing eyes holds up a torch in Gloomwood

Immersive sims are also substantially harder to develop than shooters, something New Blood has an acute understanding of.

“David has talked about the way he designed levels for DUSK”, Rogers says.

We could not do that.

A room in pacifist immersive sim ETOS, showing a laser turret and it’s control computer on screen

It takes us as least three to four months to make a single level."

So how is it possible with a team of three, two, or even as a solo dev?

Making immersive sims outside of traditional game development isn’t just about mitigating problems, of course.

A conversation about capitalism in stealth immersive sim RPGPeripeteia

This has resulted in a toolset that focusses on enemy and environmental manipulation rather than violence.

ETOS’s pacifist angle also lets Mab explore the world narratively in a way other immersive sims can’t.

The other advantage indie immersive sims bring is much simpler, new perspectives.

The inventory in stealth RPG Peripeteia

But with this new generation of game designers, that’s changing.

One such example isPeripeteia, an immersive sim hailing from Poland.

“A place where belief, ideology, and demons of the past meet in a cyber future.”

But this is filtered through Poland’s unique history.

This isn’t to say these games are each being made in their own bubble.

Tucci’s own signoff gets to the heart of the matter.

“Sometimes if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself.”