Some of the finest video game characters can be found a little further away from the foreground. Resident Evil's deliciously eerie Spencer Mansion; the sunken city of Rapture; the impossibly beautiful ring world of Halo: Combat Evolved. Upcoming adventure game The Bunker is another game where the backdrop is perhaps the most important character, an underground nuclear shelter that's frozen in time, furnished with hard beige fittings and soundtracked by the whirring of old hard drives that power chunky monochrome monitors.
It's a place born from the paranoia of the 50s and 60s and the very real nuclear threat, the polite austerity of its interior the perfect amplifier of that creeping feeling of dread as you explore its many levels. This bunker is a very real space, though. You can even visit it if you want - plenty of people did during the filming of The Bunker, after all. "We filmed in Kelvedon Hatch, in Brentwood," says explains developer Splendy's Allan Plenderleith. "It's a secret nuclear bunker that's not so secret, with a big brown sign pointing you towards it. It's always full of boy scouts and old ladies, and they never close it down. Even when we were filming an old lady would occasionally stroll into shot. It's not exactly The National Trust - but it's very atmospheric and hasn't changed since the government left."
I'm talking to Plenderleith over Skype as he sits in a spacious shed in his Berkhamsted home, where he's joined by Splendy co-founder and producer on The Bunker Simon Sparks. Both have experience in the world of TV and film - Plenderleith in screenwriting and children's television, Sparks, delightfully, in hairdressing - which pushed them towards their first big gaming success, the iOS adventure The Hunting. A horror game once carried out in live action (Plenderleith pulls a maggot still moist with KY jelly from just out of shot, a prop in the schlocky horror of the game) it was successful enough to push both of them towards something more ambitious second time round.
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