Stephen King has carved a legacy as one of the most prolific and successful horror authors in history, earning the moniker “The King of Horror” over the course of his 50-year career. His masterful works have sold 350 million copies around the world, and many of his books have been adapted into successful film and television franchises.
So it’s a tremendous compliment when a man who is so intimately associated with the concept of horror itself refers to you as its future. That was the situation when Mr. King came upon British horror novelist Clive Barker’s twisted inventions. On the first paperback edition of Barker’s Books of Blood, he is quoted as having said, “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.”
However, whereas King’s horror is more anchored in fact, Clive Barker’s fiction conjures up visceral pictures of damnation and depravity, which are on full exhibit in Clive Barker’s Jericho.
Barker has been unafraid to explore the brutal underbelly of horror since the beginning of his career as a writer. Books of Blood, his debut book as an author, is a six-volume anthology that exudes gloom. Tales of horrifying blood rituals, sexual abuse, demonic possessions, necrophilia, mutilation, and graphic violence infuse the reader with a sense of terror and mystical awe like no other.
Hellraiser, his most well-known work to date, has produced a multi-media series that comprises ten films, sequel and prequel novels, and many comic books. He also scripted and directed the first film, bringing the Cenobites’ terror to life on screen. Barker is a talented illustrator who has contributed to a number of Barker’s publications, including The Thief of Always and Arabat.
When it came time to bring Jericho to life, Barker envisioned a game as groundbreaking as the Alien franchise was for cinema and television. Barker had always had the basic structure of the plot in his head, and when Mercury Steam provided him the opportunity to bring it to life, he seized the opportunity to create a memorable game for horror fans.
Clive Barker’s Jericho is a game in which Barker has placed his indelible touch on everything from the plot to the character design to the soundtrack. Cris Velasco’s frightening, atmospheric, almost gospel-like music draws you into the game’s supernatural overtones, which run on the last-gen Unreal 3 engine, which dazzles you with its graphics.
On paper, it ticks all the boxes of a blood-soaked, shamanic First Person Shootergame: gratuitous violence, surrealist imagery, psychological terror, and a landscape that makes the word macabre seem cheerful.
Gore-hounds and goth-heads of 2007 must have rejoiced when it came out, because on paper, it ticks all the boxes of a blood-soaked, shamanic First Person Shootergame: gratuitous violence, surrealist imagery, psychological Jericho, however, fell short of its promise and was lost to the sands of time.
Clive Barker’s Jericho, a buried masterpiece in the horror genre of gaming with a scary narrative, brutal action sequences, and distinctively repulsive monsters, was released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows, and we’ll go through them all in this video.
“Before Adam & Eve, there was the Firstborn…” The Story of Jericho
The game starts with a dream in which an uncanny, child-like thing with black, bioluminescent skin and stark, white eyes pleads with us to save it from the storm. Captain Devin Ross, the protagonist and major first-person perspective in the early game, becomes our focus.
He receives a call that confirms his foreshadowing dream and prepares for deployment. In the aircraft that’s transporting Ross & his team, we get a rundown of the reason fortheir deployment. Ross heads the elite, black ops squad codenamed Jericho that is a part of the Department of Occult Warfare: a wing so secretive, even the government is unaware of its existence. We get a brief of Jericho’s mission on the way to the drop site.
The ancient city of Al-Khali, a location that has been fought over for centuries by governments and empires alike, is experiencing a temporal anomaly unlike anything the team has ever seen. Operation Vigil’s objectives seem simple enough: locate the traitor Arnold Leach and his Brotherhood of the Dark Rapture, neutralize them, and fix the temporal anomaly.
But once they make contact with Al-Khali, things start going awry almost immediately. They’re attacked by Leach’s Cultists, but something’s wrong with them: their bodies are twisted & mutilated like a broken tree’s limbs, their heads are wrapped like mummies, their hands are hooked and worst of all; they’re all dead, reanimated by some form of magic beyond their current understanding.
Ross divides the crew into two squads, Alpha and Omega, in order to gather the data from the Al-Khali Research Facility and figure out what’s causing the supernatural sandstorm. While his crew explores for data backups and survivors, Leach strikes and kills Ross in a brutal manner; or so it appears.
Every member of Jericho specializes in their own field of the occult arts. Devin Ross is Jericho’s residential healer and psychic, and when his body perishes, his psyche latches on to his teammates’, effectively turning them into vessels for his consciousness. This also imbues them with his healing abilities, while Ross can utilize their powers in-turn.He first shares space with Frank Delgado, Jericho’s big gun: quite literally.
Delgado is the squad’s pyromancer, having struck a bargain with Ababanili, the Flame Spirit. Delgado gave up his right arm to house the Spirit within his own body, which, when released, transforms into a flaming dragon that wreaks havoc on foes nearby.
He can also use the spirit’s powers to erect a Fire Barrier that burns any units approaching him and can outright kill them if their hit points are sufficiently low. As the squad’s heavy, Delgado has by far the most resilience, with the best armour in the squad.
His personalized 7.62 caliber mini-gun Hell’s Keeper can fire 1000 live rounds continuously making Frank one of the best characters for that rapid-fire gun-toting FPS experience. As the game progresses, Ross “unlocks” the ability to possess all 6 of his teammates, which proves critical at certain sections of the game. Let’s take a look at the rest of Jericho.
Lieutenant Abigail “Abbey” Black, a telekinetic sniper, is Jericho’s sniper. Her primary weapon is a heavily modified, privately tailored US XM-110 SASS sniper, with an attached grenade launcher serving as her secondary armament.
Her signature weapon is the Ghost Bullet, that Black can telekineticallysteer mid-flight, allows extremely high levels of accuracy (more headshots, in short). She can also use the ability defensively by stopping or redirecting incoming projectiles and temporarily stunning enemies. However, the ability requires hit points to keep it active and her health bar will deteriorate faster the longer this power is used.
Wilhelmina, Sergeant The squad’s Sanguimancer is “Billie” Church (blood magic user for you non-occult types). She is one of Jericho’s physically weaker members, preferring melee battle over long-ranged weapon warfare. She more than makes up for it with her speed, being the fastest member of the team. Her weapons of choice are “Kenju” (a 30-round, rapid-fire machinepistol) and “Nodachi”(a lethal Japanese sword that can deal immense damage to enemies).
As a saguimancer, Church can cast powerful blood magic. Her Blood Ward ability creates a mystic sphere that shoots out tendrils at nearby enemies, incapacitating them long enough for Nodachi to finish them off. Her Fire Ward ability creates a fiery sphere that engulfs any enemies it ensnares (especially helpful against aerial units).
The group’s “Seer” is Captain Xavier Jones. He has cryptic visions of the past and future, which makes him a valuable asset to the gang. His Second Sight also allows him to detect paranormal activities. Jones’ ability to use Astral Projection allows him to possess an enemy or an object and use his powers to conjure a Blood Ward or set things on fire. He carries the Patrioteer AR and semi-auto mounted shotgun as his weapon of choice, the same weapon as Ross.
Corporal Simone Cole is a “Reality Hacker,” as the game refers to her. Her numerical, computational, and programming abilities are so sophisticated that she is essentially a thinking machine (shoutout to Frank Herbert). Augmented with a wearable computer, gesture-based UI, and HUD interface, she runs custom-made Cabalistic and chaos mathematic sequences that affect reality itself.
Using her Infinite Loop ability, she can slow down time around the Jericho Squad by looping it, leaving her free to attack multiple targets with lethal force. When she uses Firestorm, Jericho Squad’s weapons get a temporary power boost, increasing their damage.
Cole is also how the game explains “checkpoints” in general, as she creates “anchors” in time. Her weapon of choice is an X-86 AR that can fire up to 900 rounds a minute, and she utilizes an array of grenades as well, which dish out huge area damage to hordes of enemies.
Finally, there’s Father Paul Rawlings, a Jericho exorcist and field specialist who is a battle veteran, priest, and encyclopaedia of magical knowledge. Rawlings’ power stems from his faith and expertise; he is the group’s lone exorcist, making him essential against astral beings.
Rawlings’ healing abilities are far superior to Ross’; with Ghost Heal he can revive teammates at long distances with a traveling blue sphere of energy. Using Vlad’s Curse, Rawlings can drain blood from his enemies and use it to restore his team’s hit points; if they’re sufficiently weakened, this ability will kill them. Rawlings dual-wields Desert Eagles named Faith & Destiny with three ammo settings: Piercing (consumes 1 bullet; best for short range), Concussion (consumes 3 bullets; best for medium range) & Explosive (consumes 5 bullets; best for long range).
The ability to “thread” the powers of two characters together to create a completely new character is a unique feature of this game. Ross has perfected his psychic talents to the point that he can freely travel between bodies and combine the abilities of his colleagues to increase their efficacy.
For instance, if the player decides to thread Abbey’s telekinesis with Jones’ Astral Projection, they will be able to shoot targets that are hidden from their sight, thanks to Jones’ abilities to travel through objects.
If you thread Abbey with Cole, you can slow down time while controlling your bullet, allowing you to hit multiple targets at once. This allows the player to create their own combinations of abilities, which is a pretty nifty customization feature if you ask us. The only drawback is you’ll have to unthread the ability in-use to create a new one.
They press deeper into the Pyxis(pronounce:-Pix-is)- a pocket realm created by God to confine the Firstborn- after recovering from Leach’s onslaught, and the timeline begins to regress as the game goes. Players will journey through four different eras: World War II, the Crusades, the Roman Era, and Ancient Sumeria, about 3,000 BCE.
In each time period, Jericho Squad will have to solve puzzles, tacklea boss fight and take on new enemy units, which include Exploding Cultists, Flying Cultists, Machine Gunners, Flamethrowers, Grenadiers, Crusaders, Roman Legionaries & Gladiators as well as two mini-boss Behemoths that need to be dealt with in order to progress.
As Jericho clears each time period, they delve into the inner sanctum of the Pyxis where they encounter the objective of Operation: Godseal; the Firstborn itself. Throughout their mission, Jericho encountered some of humanity’s most heinous figures, reanimated and morphed into beings that do the Firstborn’s bidding.
These entities first travelled to Al-Khali in search of power, but what they found left their mind, body, and soul broken. Now, they reside in a menagerie of grotesque & carnal obscenity, and each villain is more disturbing than the last.
Soul-Terrifying Creatures of Jericho – Explored
The Firstborn: God’s Biggest Mistake
The Firstborn; God’s Abomination is the first opponent we meet, and he is a component of Ross’ fever dream. God created the Firstborn, an androgynous person with unrealized potential, before he created Adam and Eve.
However, that potential drove God to banish the Firstborn from existence, casting it down from Heaven & into the Pyxis, with its contact zone being Al-Khali. For millennia, the Firstborn has been haunting/enchanting mankind through their dreams. The Firstborn’s presence throughout the entire game can be summed up in one word: disturbing.
This androgynous, child-like entity doesn’t have a single voice; rather, its voice is a fragmented collection of male, female & children’s voices. Every time the Firstborn speaks, you can’t help but feel unsettled.
It’s an enigma come alive; strangely beautiful, utterly malevolent, yet hungry for love (according to The Centurion, anyway). Don’t let that fool you, though; this being is anything but friendly.
Since it was imprisoned, the Firstborn has tempted humans to set it free, and its release is part of an apocalyptic prophecy: it will breach the Pyxis seven times, the seventh of which will be its last, wreaking devastation on the world its Father created. The Firstborn sends dreams to humans susceptible to mysticism, asking them to “help” it free itself from the Pyxis.
In reality, everyone who has ever sought out the Firstborn (knowingly or otherwise) has had their souls taken away from them, reanimated by the Firstborn in any image it deems fit. As the game progresses, we learn that the Breaches caused by the Firstborn require extremely potent magic and blood sacrifice to be opened, which leads us to the horrible realization that the first-born is, in fact, acquiring enough souls to “break free” of its imprisonment.
It is an extremely powerful being in its own right as well. The Firstborn can phase through spaces, appearing anywhere it wishes to. It can use a sorcerer’s magic against them; as evidenced in the final confrontation, where the Firstborn started copying Church’s Blood Ward to immobilize Jericho. Not to say it doesn’t have powers of its own.
Spoiler Alert, Jones & Cole die before the final confrontation begins because, in its rage, the Firstborn unleashes a wave of electrical impulses so strong it literally blows their bodies apart. While the Firstborn is disturbing on a cosmic level, his immediate subordinate reviles you with his very appearance.
Arnold Leach
Arnold Leach appears for the first time in the opening briefing. When Leach was a member of the D.O.W., a photo of him and Rawlings shows them together. With a squat nose and a red hat, he appears to be an ordinary man. Arnold Leach, on the other hand, appears to be Satan the first time we encounter him.
You see, Arnold Leach discovered the Firstborn’s existence but rather than stopping it from Breaching the Pyxis, he fell under its influence and tried to set it free. Leach started the Brotherhood of the Dark Rapture, a heretical cult that worshipped the Firstborn as the deliverer of mankind.
Over the course of 20 years, Leach and his cult committed multiple soul-defiling crimes: gas attacks in Sydney, grisly homicides in Baltimore and a string of sacrilegious sacrifices in the forms of children & babies in London. They stored up all of this negative karma and released it in a bloody suicidal ritual, whereby the cult members underwent torture that eventually left their bodies mutilated upon reanimation.
Evidently, their range of power varies. Regular Cultists are essentially treated like foot soldiers, Exploding Cultists are pustule-ridden creatures that self-destruct and take everything in their blast radius with them, and the Flying Cultists are leather-winged nightmares that shoot claws and savage people to death. Arnold Leach became something even more grotesque; he became the very anti-thesis of human.
When Leach attacks Ross, we get our first glimpse of him, and it’s enough to give us nightmares. His skull has a pentagram cut into it, as well as a cross impaled in it. His flesh is stretched along a gigantic, spiky, curving metal apparatus that curls around his back like a mad halo.
His skin is mutilated in places, his fingers & feet are talons, and his leathery, spiky wings spread across his sides making him look like a grim angel that has been stripped of its beauty and morphed into an abominable travesty. Leach begins the game by violently slashing Ross’ body, spilling his blood in service of the Firstborn.
Surprisingly, we never get a proper fight against Leach beyond this interactive cut-scene. He reappears when the Jericho Squad travels to the Crusade Era, having manipulated that timeline’s Jericho contingent into believing he is the Archangel Gabriel and the invaders are the actual heathens.
Leach meets his end with a jarring shift in purpose. Till the very end of the game, he tried to unleash the Firstborn. But it betrayed him, nailing him to its sanctum’s walls. Leach decides to end what he started, and forces the Firstborn into the pure energy void it came from, seemingly dying with it. Though he technically saved the day, Leach can hardly be called a saviour. While the gore with Leach was mostly focused on him, the next three villains are the true horrors of this game.
Hanne Lichthammer
Hanne Lichthammer was once a magnificent Teutonic beauty; it’s a shame this blue-eyed stunner turned out to be a Nazi. Several stories surfaced in the 1930s claiming that Hitler’s Nazi Party was devising occult tactics to win the war, and that they were succeeding.
The GeheimnisvollAbwehrmacht, Hitler’s Occult Defense Division, was headed up by Lichthammer, who had been a powerful psychic even then. Their brutal combat effectiveness was revealed in the Spanish Civil War, where the GA’s clandestine interrogation & assassination missions drove targets insane because of Lichthammer’s sadistic obsession with pain.
After discovering the magical potential of Al-Khali, Hitler dispatched a unit to secure it immediately, followed by Lichthammer’s GA. The psychotic psychic’s occultists were engaged by the British Psychic Commando unit Blackwatch, but both the Allies & Axis forces disappeared in 1939, and all contact was lost with them; until we encountered them in the game.
The Jericho Squad arrives in Al-Khali and teleports to 1939, where they begin walking the “Path of Souls” to seize the next breach site. Church falls over as she travels over the walkway, realising that the entire route is made up of dead people.
Lichthammer psychically controls a dead body and attacks Church, hurling gut-wrenching insults at her. She acts them and reveals her true form: a zombie-like being, wearing a Nazi army uniform, her eyes milk-white, her flesh eaten off, ribs showing.
Just looking at her is enough to give us sleepless nights. While fighting her isn’t tough, it is extremely tricky; she can teleport to any place on the battlefield, can rip apart people’s sanity, and has researched the Pyxis enough to be able to control flies and thereby summon undead GA soldiers. All of this, while she attempts to violently murder Jericho Squad’s members.
There’s also the exorcism. Father Rawlings tries to exorcise Lichthammer after Jericho’s Alpha Team captures her in order to obtain information from her. In the interactive cutscene that comes next, Lichthammer viciously chews out Rawlings and Black; verbally and literally!
She hurls obscenities at Church, ridiculing the abuse she faced in her childhood, implies Rawlings is a pedophile, and tries to chew his fingers off when he’s performing the ritual. The animation for this is particularly gory. As a character, Lichthammer comes off as utterly psychotic with no notion of humanity left in her. Yet somehow, the next two bosses top her sense of depraved malevolence.
Bishop Maltheus St. Clair
The Crusades Era in Clive Barker’s Jericho is the game’s most bizarre phase. As previously stated, the Crusaders of this era were influenced by Leach and turned against Jericho Squad. As the squad advances, they come upon another Crusader, but he is nothing like the first.
Having resisted the Firstborn’s influence, he has been tortured and mutilate to the brink of insanity. This Crusader recounts to us his original purpose; not to cause the Breach, but to seal it, which had been caused by the mad Bishop Maltheus St. Clair. Maltheus convinced Pope Innocent III that he had seen the location of the Garden of Eden, and assembled an army of children, leading them in a Holy Crusade to claim it.
He argued that their pure, innocent Christian blood would protect them from the infidels’ attacks. It is even suggested in the Jericho Databook that Maltheus had “unnatural appetites that couldn’t be satiated”, hinting at an unsettling obsession with children. When the Church got wind of his notions, they dispatched the Templars at once. By the time they arrived, it had been too late.
Tens of thousands of children had been atrociously slaughtered by the Saracens, and their blood opened the Breach. Maltheus himself fell under the influence of the Firstborn and went insane, thinking he had done God’s bidding.
When Jericho Squad approaches him, they run into the Child Crusaders’ spirits, and what follows can only be characterised as grotesquely depressing. The Children had lost their limbs and been converted into ghost-like spirits with the ability to reappear in reality at any time.
As they advanced, they utilised their veins as tentacles to assault the Squad. When they encountered Maltheus, he immediately branded them as heretics and began attacking them with Al-Khali’s Black Rose: a metallic shield that could be discharged as projectiles. Combined with his force field-like defence and the short span of vulnerability he had, it was extremely tough to get a decisive hit on him.
Though the Child Crusaders attacked Jericho initially, during the fight with Maltheus, they seem more focused on annihilating him. Maltheus’ disillusionment with reality made him believe the children he’d sent on the Crusade had turned into thralls of the Devil. The children were merely extracting their revenge for their heinous and needless deaths.
Maltheus suffers the most tragic and deserved death in the game; after his shootout with Jericho Squad, he is whipped & impaled to death by the vengeful spirits of the Child Crusaders. Seems like a fitting end, right? Sadly, the Romans couldn’t help but outdo everyone else, in everything else.
Governor CassusVicus
Imagine being so hedonistic that Caligula had no choice but to expel you from the Empire. But such was Governor CassusVicus’ sadomasochism, a real monster among men. Vicus would be the Cenobites if Barker’s Cenobites ever occurred. Any horrific act in the world is likely to have been perpetrated by him.
He is a monstrously gluttonous man who has had his stomach sewed back together and is unable to walk normally. His palace is covered with faeces and human flesh. Vicus seems to have a taste for human flesh himself; he says he cannibalized the last Jericho Squad that made it to him.
Like the other bosses, he has been disillusioned by the Firstborn to the point where he thinks his rapacious dystopia is actually Elysium; the fabled paradise island from Roman mythology. Everything about Vicus is sinful and heretical: all he cares about is feasting, fornicating & killing.
He thrusts the Jericho Squad into a Gladiator fight with a hulking, armoured beast, before fighting himself. It’s his choice of combat that is truly disturbing. Vicus hangs his shoulder’s flesh upon hooks, “opens” his abdominal cavity, and squirts his blood onto the Squad, dealing near-fatal damage every time he does so.
Talk about gore. But this is also when he is at his most vulnerable, so Jericho has to keep persisting till Vicus finally stops spilling his poisonous guts out and died leaking his entrails. Out of all the bosses, Vicus is the true embodiment of depravity.
He tortures, rapes, kills & cannibalizes his eternal subjects for his own pleasure. He has done this for 2,000 years and would keep doing so until the end of time, if he hadn’t been killed first.
What happened to Jericho 2?
Clive Barker claimed after the original game’s release that a sequel was in the works. In reality, he revealed the initial location in a 2007 interview with The New York Times: 666 youngsters gathered on a naval vessel for an unknown purpose. We’re kind of glad we never found out what would have happened to those children if we knew anything about the man by now.
Barker wanted to create a trilogy of games, but as time passed, it became evident that that was going to be impossible. Clive Barker’s Jericho was a popular game and it was seminal in changing the perception of horror-based FPS games; but it was also a commercial (& somewhat critical) failure.
While most critics praised the game for its incredible & original storyline, the gameplay was a major dud. For an FPS game, it was deemed repetitive and basic. Weapons in the game were mostly indistinguishable in-use, barring the obvious exceptions. The AI was clunky & glitchy, with NPCs blending into the environment. And perhaps the most frustrating thing was the extremely abrupt ending.
Everything that happened up until the final confrontation played out like a fantastical fever dream; you could even forgive the crude gameplay mechanics. But that ending just left a sour taste in the mouth.
That, coupled with poor sales figures & rampant piracy tanked any aspirations for sequels, which is a shame, because we’d love to get a re-boot of this game on a new-gen engine that can support its ambitious machinations. And, of course; who doesn’t want their gory horror game to look that much more realistic & scary?