A team of industry veterans has revealed their new psychological analog horror game, Imprinted, which will be released on PC via Steam later in 2026.
Indie studio Cobalt Lane’s debut game will let us dive into the dark obsession of jaded sound engineer, Vincent Brandt.
Vincent is brought in to restore the lost recordings of Viola Fossati, a mysterious 1970s experimental musician whose story ended far too abruptly. At first, Vincent thinks he’s simply fixing up broken tapes and repairing the audio, but something inside those recordings starts pushing back.
Imprinted’s Analog Horrors Sound Tantalizing
The game takes place entirely on Vincent’s computer screen, where players will restore corrupted and incomplete recordings from Viola’s archives by using audio tools to discover hidden details.
“The core of our story grew from this idea that human experience gets imprinted upon everything - including sound,” said Filippo Beck Peccoz, Creative Director at Cobalt Lane. “Vincent and Viola never share a room, never speak face-to-face, but through these broken tapes they form a strange, intimate connection. This ‘conversation’ sparks Vincent’s creativity to a degree that throws Vincent into a spiral of obsession and loss of control.’’
Last year’s banned screenlife horror game Vile: Exhumed was both engrossing and upsetting, but its greatest quality was how it sucked you into its familiar onscreen rituals of ‘one more click’ internet rabbit holes. While Imprinted is going down a different path, it’s giving me a lot of the same vibes, and frankly, that has me itching to get my hands on it.
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