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Abandoned – the survival horror game that initially had fans thinking it was a Silent Hill title – is reportedly not “actively being worked on”.
That’s according to a new report from GameSpot (opens in new tab), which states that several people close to director Hasan Kahraman say “there is no game” and that he has allegedly privately admitted that Abandoned is “on hold and he first needs to fund its development with a playable prologue, which our sources indicate he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to create”.
Kahraman was recently taken by surprise when fans started speculating that a rash of deleted social media posts (opens in new tab) at the beginning of April meant that the beleaguered game had been canceled or… well, abandoned.
Kahraman says that the team deleted these tweets in an effort to erase outdated information about the game and expressed his surprise that the studio’s actions led to uncertainty over Abandoned’s future.
However, Gamespot purports that interviews with “more than half a dozen people who have had close contact with Kahraman since September 2021” have detailed a game “in disarray and a developer who promises a lot, including paid work for fans, but delivers very little”.
A private Discord server – the members of which were hand-picked by Kahraman and asked to sign an NDA – was used to shared “screenshots, animations, and even a page of the game’s script”, but if any member challenged or questioned anything, they’d get kicked or a new group would be created that excluded them. Some members reportedly describe Kahraman as “duplicitous and prone to mood swings”.
“Kahraman used to tell the group he was actively working on Abandoned, but as time went on, he would fail to show much of anything that seemed genuine or compelling, often even missing self-imposed deadlines,” the report states. “For instance, after saying he had a reveal planned for a day of the week, that day would come and go without a new development.”
Blue Box has responded to the allegations, telling PC Gamer: (opens in new tab) “It is in development, all of this is just out of context resulted by angry fans who did not see the game, the article written by Gamespot is just based on what these angry users speculate. One of them is pretending to be an [sic] business partner.
“The Prologue will be released whenever we are ready. We are not letting speculation force us to ‘prove’ the game.”
Abandoned caused a bit of a ruckus last year when rumors began to swirl that the game was possibly linked to the canceled Silent Hills game and Hideo Kojima (opens in new tab). Blue Box was quick to deny the reports but has since acknowledged that the game was “announced too soon” (opens in new tab), and will not be called Abandoned at all when it’s eventually released.
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Vikki Blake is GamesRadar+’s Weekend Reporter. Vikki works tirelessly to ensure that you have something to read on the days of the week beginning with ‘S’, and can also be found contributing to outlets including the BBC, Eurogamer, and GameIndustry.biz. Vikki also runs a weekly games column at NME, and can be frequently found talking about Destiny 2 and Silent Hill on Twitter.
