Fairly enthusiastic about his first experience in video games, the British writer jumped onto new projects. A cooperation effort with Terminal Reality for the 3rd person action game Demonik fell through because of publisher Majesco's financial difficulties, but Barker soon concluded a new pact offered by Codemasters, once again a first-person shooter involving the macabre settings of the author. This time the project was conceived by a Spanish company called MercurySteam. Jericho was the developer's second big after developing American Mc Gee presents Scrapland (which merely bore the famous id-alumnus' name for marketing purposes), but most of the team came from Rebel Act Studio, creator of the cult hack-and-slash title Severance: Blade of Darkness in the early 2000s.

The game has no link whatsoever with the previous game bearing the "Clive Barker" brand name. The game takes place in a parallel modern earth where mystical forces of good & evil have been fighting each other for thousands of years. Main charcter Captain Ross is at the head of a US special force dealing with the occult, which is mostly composed of powerful (but somewhat unstable) psychics, witches and priests: the Jericho squad. The drama starts when Ross and his team are ordered to reach Al-Khali, an ancient Iraqi city. Indeed, the ravaged ground is only a cover, hiding a mystical trap made to contain The First Born: the first being created by God. Seeing that the thing was a wee bit too powerful and absolutely amoral, the Lord decided to seal it in a box. But the influence of the First Born pours through the walls of Al-Khali, beckoning evil men to the box and promising them power in exchange of destroying the prison. This brings us back to the Jericho squad: Arnold Leach, a former agent of Jericho who has gone rogue, destroys the seal of the box, leaving the protagonist with only one option: to go to the heart of the box in order to restore the seal. Unfortunately, before crossing the portal to the first layer of the box, Leach manages to kill Ross. But don't worry, that's only the first half-hour of the game.

Actually, Ross' powers as a healing medium and the influence of the box prevent him from dying. His spirit survives, but his body doesn't. The main gimmick of the game resides in possessing the six remaining members of the team. Through a menu or simply by aiming at other Jericho squad members, you can possess them. You can also dispatch simple orders (attack/hold fire/hold position) to both Jericho's fire teams. His healing ability allows you to raise up downed allies. Of course, you can't heal your current host and being taken out automatically transfers you to an able host. But watch out, even if you can heal other members, a complete wipe of the team means game over. Indeed, the content of the box is under full control of the First Born: meaning that every person dying in it ends up raised and controlled by it (a clever way to generate infinite waves of enemies). So the key to mastering the gameplay dwells in knowing the strength of your unfortunate comrades. Sometimes brute force is required and sometimes stealth is more effective.

Characters

Captain Devin Ross

Briefly played through the tutorial section, Ross is both a psychic and a healer. The later allowed him to trick death and possess his allies. As the team leader, Ross is pretty level-headed, usually thinking two steps ahead for the mission. From time to time, he sees the ghost of a kid, a casualty of a previous mission that acts as a beacon through the game. Voiced by the omnipotent Steve Blum.

Captain Xavier Jones

Jericho's second in command. He carries a HKG36C assault rifle with an XM26 semi-automatic mounted shotgun. As an astral projector, Jones can possess an enemy, stunning him and allowing you to use pyrokinesis or telekinesis from afar. This ability is also required for puzzle solving. Unfortunately he can't be used very often. Jones is a level-headed bookworm and acts as the translator for the team and as a vessel for ghosts and other spirits, a rather useful ability in Al-Khali.

Lieutenant Abigail Black

A sniper gifted with telekinetic power and without a doubt the most useful character in the game. Her precision rifle is equipped with a grenade launcher, which is really useful to power your way through the swarms of enemies. Her main ability is called the "Ghost Bullet," another word for bullet time camera. By controlling the bullet itself, she can kill up to three enemies in the same shot. Telekinesis acts as a simple force wave that repels enemies and breaks down specific walls. Thanks to childhood trauma, Black tends to be extremely aggressive and foul-mouthed all the time. She softens a bit as the game goes on.

Sergeant Frank Delgado

The heavy weapons guy fights with a Gatling gun, whose main advantage resides in delivering headshots surprisingly often. In case he ever runs out of bullets, Frank also possesses a "sidearm:" He once bound a parasitic fire-spirit called Ababinili by sacrificing his right arm. By opening its protective shell, Delgado can unleash the demon on nearby enemies. Unfortunately, the longer Ababinili wreaks havoc, the more damage Delgado takes, but he is also immune to fire. Under his parasite's influence, Frank is pretty much a dick. Prone to bursts of anger, he will keep nagging at the other squad members and makes the dumbest of decisions.

Sergeant Wilhelmina 'Billie' Church

A dual classed ninja/blood witch and point man for Jericho. She fights dual-wielding a rapid-fire sub machine pistol and a katana. She can silently kill enemies that are unaware of her presence. Needless to say she is required in the stealth sections of the game, going solo to open the way for Jericho. She can use two kinds of ward: blood & fire. The first stuns enemies while the second immolates them. Using them is a double-edged sword since those powers actually hurt Church.

Corporal Simone Cole

A reality-hacker and the support for the team. She can bend time and space through mathematical calculations, explaining the "check-points" through diegesis. Cole can also activate slow motion for a short period and automatically replenish ammo for everyone (she "rewinds" time). Best left as an AI character since her weapons, a sub-machine gun and explosives, aren't very useful. Mildly autistic, Cole tends to spurt techno-babble all the time. Her devices allow her to detect the temporal distortion and therefore to guide the team to the heart of Al-Khali.

Father Paul Rawlings

Jericho's oldest member, an exorcist with twin Desert Eagles. Various ammo types can be used for his weapons (standard, explosive and fragmentation). While his exorcist skills only matter during cut-scenes, he still is a pretty good healer. Unlike Ross, he can raise members from great distance using "Ghost Heal." Last but not least, "Vlad's Curse" allows him to drain enemies' life force and dispatch it to nearby allies. Pretty stereotypical "too old for this shit" guy, he remains cool under pressure and knows a great deal about Jericho's history.

Even undead, your objective stays the same: reach the heart of the Praxis and restore the seal on the First Born. Unfortunately for the team, Al-Khali acts like a matriochka (a friendly NPC actually carries matriochkas in his backpack to explain this). Every time someone closes the box, the First Born takes a piece of the real world into his prison. So to reach his true lair, you need to cross all the eras where seven wizards (Jericho's forerunners) sealed the damn thing: World War II, The Third Crusade, Ancient Rome & Ancient Sumeria. Every era has its bad guys and a specific boss, keeper of the exit. You will fight a sadistic Nazi officer, a fallen ecclesiastic, a depraved Roman governor & the original Seven Warriors. It's not going to be easy.

There is no other way to say it; the game just isn't very good. First off, every environment is bathed in total darkness, which is very annoying since your (otherwise infinite) flashlight will turn off every few seconds. The scenery is barely noticeable and the level design consists of endless dark-grey corridors for the two first eras visited. From bad to worse, the enemies attack in waves, but unlike Call of Duty the waves won't disappear if you break through them. Nope, you need to fight X waves of enemies for X minutes. You will welcome with relief the sections where the team splits since it cancels the "waves" of enemies and offers a much better pace. When going solo with Church or Delgado, you can actually stealth your way through enemies, which is nice.

Enemy variation is very scarce in Jericho. From the first level to the last one, three types of enemies will always return: the cultists, the explosive cultists and the big cultists. It's awful, since those guys are bullet sponges and have an uninspired design. Still, every era gets its own enemies: flame-throwing hulks, skinned crusaders, legionaries, and so on. The enemies aren't memorable at all, except maybe for the creepy ghost crusader children. The bosses on the other hand each have a personality, a specific design and an interesting background (you unlock info files about characters & enemies). Each of them has a pattern you need to learn and a specific squad character needed to dispose of them.

The graphics are ugly, gross and ark. Someone apparently decided that Barker's aesthetics could be summed up with corridors painted in blood and feces. It stops being unnerving after two minutes in and feels really lazy. Enemy design is pretty much the same, every monster looks like a Cenobite-wannabe. Instead of provoking fear or uneasiness, Jericho's graphics are simply boring. Strangely enough, the game starts to look nice during the Ancient Rome era with gigantic white marble columns and Pompeii style paintings. A shame this change only arrives after five hours of interchangeable backgrounds.

The worst thing about Jericho is the ending. After suffering through the insipid level design and the repetitive shooting range, you are rewarded with... nothing. There is virtually no ending after beating the final boss, just credits with no conclusion whatsoever. It really feels like a sucker-punch for people who enjoyed the story (since it's probably the only thing that the game has going for it). Looking throuhg the game's files, one stumbles upon traces of what might have been an alternate ending, offering a proper closure, was considered at one point but cut down.

Still, there are a few things that save Jericho from being a total wreck. First off, Jericho as a team works. All of the characters have their own weaknesses and strengths, and playing any one of them is enjoyable. The story (except for the ending) is good enough to keep one interested, aided by plenty of interaction between the squad members. Like in Undying, a lot of back-story exists in written form and the main plot doesn't explain everything, meaning you'd better check the ID files to uncover the whole story. Finally, the music composed Cris Velasco of God of War fame is brilliant and really sets a creepy mood.

The genesis of Jericho was difficult. Back in 2005, Mercury Steam was on the brink of closing down, thanks to Scrapland's terrible sales. The team made up a real-time tech demo of 15 seconds showing a Exorcist-like little girl possessed by a demon in a effort to promote a potential horror game to Codemasters. Greenlighted by the editor, Mercury were in very bad shape financially but back on track. According to Enric Alvarez, MercurySteam CEO:

Jericho's development was a bittersweet experiment. On one hand, I will always be grateful to Codemasters because they saved our life, but on the other hand the way the editor handled the external development didn't really enthuse us. An external development is always complicated for an editor, because a lot of money is involved and they want to control it. So, this control ends up disturbing production. Tons of documents are required on both ends, a lot of slowdowns in no-brainer decisions. Lack of trust is usually the reason for all that. Surely, someone at Codemasters was saying "Keep an eye on those little Spaniards, we don't really know what they are doing or not doing" Like always in life, things aren't black and white, only shades of grey. We were very happy but we kinda guessed that the game coming out wouldn't be the one we wished for.

And... that's exactly what happened. If you take the cinema analogy, you are the filmaker with internal producers in Spain and Codemasters, the equivalent of executive producer. And this, this is the eternal story of cinema: the more prestige the filmmaker has, the less meddling he let the studio have in his work. This kind of situation can have a happy ending or end up really bad. Jericho ended up as an irregular game. A game, when it shines, shines brightly, but with deep lacking in fundamental mechanisms. The worst mistake was, without a doubt, to pretend having a survival horror aesthetic and at the same time having six overpowered brutes who blow up everything every time. That, that was impossible. The rest of the time, the game was lacking on other points but the blame isn't only on Codemasters, we also share it. It was our first FPS, it was the beginning of next-gen consoles and we were making the game on three different platforms simultaneously: XBOX 360, PS3 & PC, the last one being the development platform.

In the end, things ended up well for Mercury Steam:

Jericho reached one milion units solds after two or three years on the market. The problem is that its price was stepped down very fast and after an interesting start, the game didn't work. Jericho gave us the sensation that if we wanted to make something great, editors had to give us space, let us tumble, because one learns from its own mistakes not others.

A lesson well-learned by Konami, since Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (as polarizing as it can be in term of gameplay), Mercury Steam's next project, ended up million seller with many critics praising its artistic direction and atmosphere.

Links:
Interview with Enric Alvarez in Sansqua Spark 3 (French)
Alternate ending found in the game's files (Thanks to Change on Something Awful)