Update: Abandoned hasn’t been abandoned! Blue Box Game Studios has released a rare new statement, which explains that rumours regarding the PlayStation 5 game’s cancellation is false. It goes on to explain the work continues on the Realtime Experience app and a playable Prologue, but this has been delayed. “Unfortunately we aren’t ready yet as we underestimated our development roadmap,” the message says.
Original Story: Do you remember Abandoned? The vapourware project from Dutch developer Blue Box Game Studios went viral last year, when some mistakenly suspected the survival horror game could be a ruse from legendary creator Hideo Kojima, similar to his Silent Hills teaser PT on the PlayStation 4. This ended up being false, but it catapulted the indie studio into the spotlight. It eventually released a Realtime Experience app on the PS5, which featured two or three seconds of in-engine footage.
It’s been a while since we last got an update from the studio, and that’s because some fans have spotted that the team has been quietly deleting posts from its Twitter account. A quick comparison between a Wayback archive of the company’s social media page and its current one reveals that dozens of messages have been deleted, including one which alluded to a playable “tech demo” inside the aforementioned Realtime Experience app.
Clearly there’s no game here, and we can’t imagine Abandoned will ever release. But it raises an interesting question about how an unknown studio managed to go viral around the world, and even release an app on the PS Store. It’s an incredible story in hindsight, and it speaks to the power of social media.
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