When puzzle adventure developer Joe Richardson needed to solve an awkward room layout issue during the creation of Death of the Reprobate—one of three titles included in The Immortal John Triptych—an unexpected chain of artistic choices led directly to one of the game's strangest items: a bucket of pink cow dung.

Quick Facts

  • Release Date: August 27, 2026
  • Platform: Xbox
  • Developer: Joe Richardson
  • Publisher: Akupara Games
  • Included Titles: Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate

How Renaissance Art and an 1850 Bull Painting Created a Puzzle

While building house interiors for Death of the Reprobate using chopped-up Renaissance and classical paintings, Richardson encountered an unexpected structural dilemma: too many doors and a desperate need for a dead-end room to avoid annoying backtracking or confusing navigation loops. Because the game's environments are built from historical artwork, simply removing a door was impossible without a matching patch of blank wall.

Six months into development, a search through museum catalogues led to Andreas Schelfhout's 1820–1830 painting Binnenplaatsje. After removing the original figures from the painting and opening up a doorway for a background musician, the courtyard scene still looked too empty. To cover a patch job in the background, Richardson turned to an 1850 work by Jacques Raymond Brascassat titled Study of a Bull.

Once the static bull was placed into the courtyard scene alongside a functional water pump, the animal's physical angle inspired a recycled and tinted water animation. That accidental visual alignment led to the creation of a puzzle involving a bucket of pink cow excrement, where players can feed the bull, collect different colors of poop, and feed the resulting substance to screaming children from a previous room.

What is Included in The Immortal John Triptych?

Published by Akupara Games, The Immortal John Triptych serves as the ultimate anthology of Joe Richardson's games. Alongside Death of the Reprobate, the collection brings together Four Last Things and The Procession to Calvary under a unified aesthetic built from Renaissance paintings and classical music.

The collection also introduces new additions, including never-before-seen deleted scenes, updated language parity across all three games, manual saves for Four Last Things, backflips in The Procession to Calvary, a button to trigger a superfluous trumpeted fanfare, and an expanded soundtrack featuring new original recordings by Eduardo Antonello.

Players can wishlist the game now ahead of its August 27, 2026 launch on Xbox.