I cannot extract a silver lining out of this announcement no matter how hard I try. This is like Activision announcing that the next Call of Duty will be made by Mojang, they’re just so fucking grossly incompatible with each other that it makes absolutely zero sense.
Is this an out of season April fools joke?
I was bewildered by this myself. The developers who were famous for their walking simulators but who fired all their staff a few years back (keeping the studio founders) have taken over a project where the original developers were dismissed amid some damaging-sounding rumours and budget overruns. Hardsuit Labs presumably had completed most of the initial writing work and concept art - their ‘tech demos’ looked pretty convincing, even though that kind of thing is very carefully managed - but must have still been a long way from anything that could be released. A mystery. See how it goes - still a year away, anyway.
The developers who were famous for their walking simulators
I was just thinking, aren’t these the guys who made Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs? So I had to go look up what else they’ve done that maybe I’ve played, and uh… Dear Esther. Which imo is the epitome a walking sim, even more so than A Machine, because at least that had some light puzzle solving and avoiding enemies. Dear Esther is just literally walking around and listening to dialogue. That’s it.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good walking sim whenever I’m in the right mood, but based on the new trailer we just got, Bloodlines 2 is not that lol. Hell, the first one isn’t even that.
Maybe they want to start branching out? If that’s the case, I’m not sure that doing it with a game that a lot of people have been waiting for and that has already had… productions issues is not the best approach. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. I kinda hope so, considering how much I love the first Bloodlines.I can’t find it now, but I remember them saying a few years ago that they wanted to branch out more, but were having a hard time finding publishers that would back them for anything that wasn’t a walking sim.
It looks like they finally found someone willing to take a chance with them.
