Summary
Three years ago, Netherlands-based developer Blue Box Game Studios announced a “cinematic survival sim” calledAbandoned. It was supposed to launch later that same year, but internet conspiracy theories spiralled this project into a level of virality that CEO Hasan Kahraman could have never anticipated.
Speculation that it wasa secret Hideo Kojima gamewrapped in a fake company ran rampant, with many believing that he had returned to Konami to work onSilent Hillafter their infamous fallout, fuelled by Geoff Keighley’s support of the newly announced game and the trailer being hosted by the official PlayStation YouTube channel.Kojima and Kahraman both denied this.
The project was then delayed into 2022 as Blue Box announced a demo and PT-like prologue to satiate our appetite in the meantime. 2022 came and went, and the studio became a ghost. You might think that it’s simply stuck in development hell. Perhaps likeHollow Knight: Silksongwe’ll hear about it when the developer is ready. But no. Abandoned has been abandoned.
All Contact Has Been Cut Off At Blue Box Game Studios
Digging into the aftermath of this strange internet mystery that gripped us in the thralls of the Covid pandemic, all I found were breadcrumbs leading to nothing. Firstly, the website has been down since May 2022, with a vague promise that “We will be right back!”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. There was originally a note at the bottom saying that Blue Box loved its supporters, but this has since been removed, along with the email contact.
Every single means of contact is blocked off. Blue Box Game Studios is a spiraling labyrinth of dead ends, leaving behind a game that we will never play.
Digging Into Blue Box Game Studios’ History
According toinsiders close to Abandoned’s development, Kahraman put the project on hold two years ago so that he could raise more funding. His key goal was to release the prologue while he gained those funds, but the same insiders claimed that he didn’t “seem to be in a hurry”. Two years later, there’s no prologue and Blue Box Game Studios has disappeared, but it’s not surprising given the company’s history.
Blue Box Game Studios was founded in 2014 as a software publisher with only 11 to 20 developers. It started drumming up hype for its new game Rewind just a year later. Described as a “mysterious horror game" for PC, Oculus, and consoles, it was an unrealistically ambitious pitch for a brand-new studio without a publisher attached.
You would play as paranormal investigator Jim Walker, communicating with ghosts via an EVP to solve puzzles. Blue Box promised 30 side stories, different endings, a dynamic narrative, and even VR support. To get the wheels turning, Blue Box launcheda Kickstarter campaignto raise funds, but the playable teaser it had promised its new fans was immediately delayed.
Things picked up though; it was greenlit on Steam, launched a now-deleted playable trailer onIndieDB, and announced three DLC packs for those who pledged €25 (along with online co-op). But then Blue Box shut the Kickstarter down because it had supposedly acquired a “private investor” who was going to fully fund the game. Faith was at an all-time low as delays had mounted, the VR mode had been cancelled, and little was being shown that lived up to those grandiose promises.
Rewind was all but dead, with little more than an empty pledge that it was still in development. But then Blue Box announced The Lost Tape, going back to the original concept of Rewind.
We are still in 2015 at this point, which means that in a single year, Blue Box announced a game, delayed it, launched a Kickstarter, cancelled the campaign, scaled back the scope, and announced an entirely new game based on the first.
That means we have The Lost Tape and Rewind: Voices of the Past being developed at once by a small indie studio that had yet to launch a single game. To make matters worse, it couldn’t find a publisher, and so it was trying to self-publish these two horror games, aiming for later that year in 2015 for The Lost Tape, and 2016 a year later for Rewind.
The Lost Tape is a paranormal investigation game that used to be the older game concept of Rewind. Ever since we changed Rewind to be a cinematic experience, The Lost Tape has become the original game.
2016 came and went without either releasing. The Lost Tape was listed on ModDB as having “ceased development”, and Rewind was rebranded in 2017 “instead of cancelling the game”.
Now called The Whisperer the scope was once again unbelievably unrealistic. Blue Box promised it would be an enormous “open world” with two player online co-op and VR support. Then it was rebranded to Unseen Faces in 2018. This kept going and going and going until finally the studio launched The Haunting in 2020.
It’s an early access Steam game you cannot buy anymore (purchase was “temporarily disabled” three years ago), and while it never launched on PlayStation,the store page is still live. Reviews discuss the litany of game breaking bugs and poor facial animations, the awful narrative, and the menus breaking as they plummet players into a black screen. “This game has never worked” reads one review. The Haunting was also abandoned.
Ten Years Later And Blue Box Game Studios Is Gone
After finally releasing the first-person horror game it had been hyping up for five years with promises it could never deliver, Blue Box announced Abandoned and broke containment. It had reached a much wider audience, propelled by the Silent Hill mystery that many accused Kahraman of fuelling. Its past of broken promises and an unplayable game it had only launched a year prior were swept aside in the internet storm—there’s no way PlayStation and Geoff Keighley would platform a scam, right?
It’s tongue-in-cheek, announcing a game called Abandoned mere months after abandoning your previous broken early access game you charged €19.99 for. Yet Abandoned’s early delays, consistent with Blue Box’s past, were shrugged off as an expectation in the pandemic, as many fans unaware of any of these past failures jumped to Kahraman’s defence. One glance at this company’s history reveals a familiar pattern that Abandoned was following almost to the letter, and it was never going to live up to the triple-A horror it was teasing with its mere 11 to 20 developers.
Much like every other Blue Box Studios game, Abandoned was abandoned. The only difference this time is that the studio itself was abandoned, too.
Abandoned
WHERE TO PLAY
Abandoned is a survival horror game from Blue Box Game Studios, notable for its tenuous links to Hideo Kojima and Silent Hill. As the kidnapped Jason Longfield, your mission is to survive a forest and find your way back to civilization.
