Layers of Fear studio Bloober Team announced a “strategic co-operation agreement” with Konami last month, fueling rumors that the Polish studio—known for its horror games—will develop a new Silent Hill. Since then, internet sleuths have uncovered three codenamed projects on the Creative Europe grants website belonging to Bloober Team, and while none of them really sound like Silent Hill games, that hasn’t stopped some quarters of the internet from concluding that, obviously, that’s exactly what they are.
But they’re not, according to Bloober Team CMO Tomasz Gawlikowski, responding to queries from IGN. Gawlikowski addressed each project, ruling out project H20 as anything particularly exciting, since it was the codename for the already-released Layers of Fear 2.
The other projects sound interesting. The project codenamed Dum Spiro was a fourth wall-breaking horror game set during World War 2 in the Polish Jewish ghetto of Litzmannstadt. “[The] player takes [the] role of the imprisoned boy who struggles against all odds in order to hide and save his little sister,” so reads the Creative Europe grant document.
But that’s been canned, at least for now. “After numerous iterations of Dum Spiro, we’ve concluded we can’t at the moment deliver it in a form that is appropriately sensitive to the topic and commercially viable at the same time,” Gawlikowski said. “In short, Dum Spiro is no longer in active development at the moment.
The other suspect listing was for project ‘Black’, described as having an “unconventional blend of the Middle Ages and alien species,” a concept that could feasibly have resulted, according to the grant document, in “spin-offs set in other historical periods.”
But don’t expect that game any time soon, if at all. “The initial idea for Black has also been shelved, and while we’re still developing a game under this codename, it’s now a much different project than what you could read on the web in the past few days.”
The studio does have two games in development, but neither relate to current rumors. “At Bloober Team we have two active internal projects, one in the production phase and one in the pre-production phase,” Gawlikowski said. “Both are going to be bigger in scope than The Medium, however, neither of them is based on themes or premises that have been circulating online in the last days.”
That isn’t a direct denial that the studio won’t make a Silent Hill game, but Gawlikowski wasn’t forthcoming with IGN about what its relationship with Konami entails. But hey, if rumors help alleviate the frustration, fans still think Abandoned might be a Silent Hill game. Konami, just make a Silent Hill game, perhaps?