Fans of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Gloomwood like to roll the words 'immersive sim' around their mouths as often as possible, savouring the fond associations with first-person drawer-rifling and guilt-ridden murder.

Yet there's something like consensus emerging among the makers of these games: it's really hard to sell an immersive sim while calling it by its name. "Is it a good marketing term? No," says New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry. "It sucks. It's awful."

New Blood was first known for its boomer shooters, namely Dusk and Ultrakill, but has sunk years into two early access imsims, the well-regarded Gloomwood and Fallen Aces. Oshry likes to joke that he's "dumping all the money into immersive sims so we can go broke like the great studios that came before us, like Looking Glass."

Yet he'd never heard the term immersive sim until Gloomwood lead Dillon Rogers started work on his Thief-and-Resi-riffing open world. "He's like, 'That's what these are called'. I'm like, 'I have never heard that before in my life. What the fuck are you talking about?'"

Oshry wasn't new to the genre. He'd grown up adoring Deus Ex and Thief. "But Thief was a stealth game," he protests. "I called it a stealth game. Deus Ex I called an FPS-RPG because it was an FPS, but it was an RPG. You had points that you put in stuff. That's what an RPG is, like Diablo."

Of course, ploughing points into skills and traits is something that's proliferated across mainstream games of all kinds in the decades since.

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