We can finally announce that our new game, Imprinted, is a ghost story about creativity - it’s about two musical worlds colliding, about the discovery of a forgotten artist and the past she left behind, and about a presence that feeds on doubt, obsession, and the darker thoughts we try to ignore. It’s a psychological thriller told through a fake operating system, where emails, audio files, chat logs, and corrupted recordings become the story itself.
And Vincent Brandt is how you experience it:
You sit at his workstation.
You open his files.
You read his messages.
You listen to what he tried to forget.
Vincent Brandt is the kind of age where people stop counting and start measuring time in projects. He’s quiet, precise, and deeply absorbed in his work. Reliable. The person you call when something important needs to be handled carefully.
Vincent built a reputation as the go-to professional for audio restoration. His skill set is niche and strange by necessity: music recordings, damaged film audio, forensic sound work, historical research. Anything that requires listening closely to what’s been lost. His clients reflect that: archivists, filmmakers, estates, people with boxes of tapes they don’t know what to do with anymore, and lawmakers.
Technology has always been part of his life. As a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, Vincent recorded everything he could with a cheap consumer tape recorder: street noise, radio fragments, conversations, accidental music. When the world moved to digital, he followed easily. He understands tape not because he worked with it professionally, but because he watched it degrade, stretch, warp, and decay over time.
What Vincent doesn’t talk about is the music on his own hard drive. It’s all there if you dig deep enough: unfinished songs, fragments of lyrics, album covers for records that were never made, guitar riffs that stop just short of becoming something real. Some tracks are complete. Most aren’t. He treats these files with a certain disdain. They aren’t backed up. They aren’t catalogued. Sometimes he hopes they’ll just disappear on their own.
Vincent restores other people’s work meticulously, but his own creative output is something he often avoids looking at too closely.
Relationships have come and gone, often dissolving as his focus on work crowded out everything else. Communication didn’t come easily. Feelings were harder to archive than files. Over time, even those relationships were stored away mentally, handled like assignments that had simply... ended.
There was a more colorful version of Vincent once. You can still find traces of him in old messages, forgotten folders, half-remembered jokes. But most of those connections have thinned with time. What remains is the work.
Underneath all of it, something has been building - a quiet resentment, a longing for what Vincent considers real artistry. He brushes the dust off other people’s creations day after day, while feeling trapped in an artisan’s loop: useful, skilled, invisible. Loving sound and music deeply, yet starting to feel jaded.
When Vincent accepts one last restoration job, the recordings of a mysterious 1970s musician named Viola Fossati, he believes it’s just another assignment. Another archive. Another set of files to clean, label, and return.
He’s wrong.
More soon.