Blue Box Studios says reports that its Silent Hill-like horror game Abandoned has been cancelled are false, and that it has simply had to push back its plans to fully reveal the game and release a prologue chapter.
Concern about a possible cancellation surfaced earlier this week, when fans noticed that Blue Box had deleted most of its tweets detailing plans for Abandoned, including that a playable demo would soon be released. That led to speculation that the project was really a scam of some sort, and that the game didn’t actually exist.
After a day of silence, Blue Box responded to the rumors with a message posted to Twitter. The studio said the game is still in development, and apologized for pushing back the promised reveal and release.
“In regards to the latest rumors regarding Abandoned being cancelled, our response to this is that these rumors are false,” the studio wrote. “We are working on the reveal via the Realtime Experience app and online channels along with the prologue for the game. These were initially planned for Q1 2022 but unfortunately we aren’t ready yet as we underestimated our development roadmap. Therefore we have delayed the reveal and the release for Abandoned: Prologue. We will release Abandoned: Prologue when it’s stable, good and ready.”
Our response to the Cancellation rumours: pic.twitter.com/EuiY8Squ52March 31, 2022
In an email sent to PC Gamer, Blue Box clarified that Abandoned: Prologue is “not a demo but a standalone game,” although it will apparently be a smaller experience than Abandoned’s “full game.” It also confirmed that Abandoned, and the Prologue, are being developed for PC, although there’s no release target yet.
“Abandoned is being developed independently for PS5 and PC,” the studio said. “We don’t have an ETA just yet for the PC version.”
Interestingly, the studio said that the PC version will not be released on Steam, but will “more likely” launch via the Epic Games Store. It also clarified that the planned Realtime Experience—the studio’s name for planned full reveal of Abandoned, presumably akin to the “playable trailer” for Silent Hills—will be exclusive to the PS5, and “won’t see daylight on PC.”
This isn’t the first time that Blue Box and Abandoned have been at the center of fan-driven rumors and accusations. Not long after the game was revealed in 2021, the Silent Hill community convinced itself that the game was in reality a revival of the cancelled Hideo Kojima project Silent Hills, a rumor that persisted for weeks despite the studio’s insistent denial that it has nothing to do with Kojima, Konami, or anything else related to Silent Hill.