The Immortal John Triptych will arrive on Xbox on August 27, 2026, and one of its strangest puzzles began with a courtyard scene, a bull painting, and an animation that was never supposed to become a game mechanic.
An Xbox Wire design account details how a scene in Death of the Reprobate gradually grew into a puzzle involving a bucket of pink cow dung. The game is one of three titles included in The Immortal John Triptych, an anthology built from Renaissance paintings and classical music.
A courtyard made from paintings
The design problem started in summer 2022, when the developer was building a house interior for Death of the Reprobate. The game’s scenes use pieces of paintings, which meant removing extra doors was not a simple matter. Any deleted doorway needed to be replaced with a matching section of blank wall, and large stretches of empty wall were difficult to find in the artwork.
Corridors risked creating tedious backtracking, while too many loops could make the layout harder to follow. A courtyard seemed like a better solution, but the paintings in the developer’s “village bits” folder did not fit together cleanly.
Six months later, a painting by Andreas Schelfhout provided the structure the scene needed. It had clear boundaries, an open floor, and a stable-style door that could connect to the previous area. The developer removed the original figures, opened up another doorway, and added a musician to keep the game’s background music rooted in the scene.
One bull created the whole mess
The revised courtyard still had an awkward gap where the removed characters had been. Several possible replacements were considered, including a figure holding a large stick and a tall Adam and Eve painting. Neither was practical for the scene, so a rectangular bull from the developer’s “stuff” folder became the answer.
The bull was static and wide enough to cover the unfinished area. That made it easier to animate than the other candidates. The next step was adding an interaction to a nearby water pump by combining pieces of river imagery into a running-water animation.
Then the bull’s position suggested a second use for the same animation. Flipping and tinting the water effect produced the game’s pink cow dung animation, turning a simple visual experiment into the foundation for a new puzzle.
The finished puzzle lets players feed the bull, with different foods producing different colors of waste. Players can collect the result in a bucket, call it a “bucket of milkshake,” and use it to feed one of the screaming children found in an earlier room.
What comes with The Immortal John Triptych?
The anthology brings together Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate. It also includes deleted scenes, updated language parity across all three games, an expanded soundtrack with new original recordings by Eduardo Antonello, manual saves for Four Last Things, backflips in The Procession to Calvary, and a button that triggers a trumpeted fanfare.
The Immortal John Triptych will be available on Xbox on August 27, 2026. The Xbox store listing is available through the official product page.
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