Look, I don't know if there was anyone more excited than me to see the Abandoned announcement, with the fan theories linking the upcoming PS5 title from studio "Blue Box" with Japanese game developer "Hideo Kojima" sounded really believable. Except that, as with our dreams about the Silent Hill's forgotten horror game, it was too good to be true.
Project Abandoned started life like any indie game, a simple YouTube demo, a Twitter page with a few dozen people interested in the new game, and a little promotion from Sony for the game being exclusive to its recent PS5 platform. What everyone didn't expect was what came later from theories and analysis that somehow linked the project to the famous Japanese game developer Kojima, who rocked the video game world exactly seven years ago with what might be described as the most innovative demo in history.
We are talking here of P.T; It is a demo launched on the PS4 platform silently and without any flashy ads or promotion befitting the name of the developer. In fact, the developer itself was none other than the fake studio 7780s Studio, which made many enter the P.T experience without any suspicion of who was behind it, or as the most creative teaser for Silent Hill's official return.
Our talk about P.T in the previous lines was not a waste of your precious time, dear reader, but rather to convey the idea that made suspicions arose about the Abandoned project. A game with a simple name, from a developer who hasn't released any previous games and magically got the support of Sony, a new demo to be launched on PS5, and many other clues as "Hasan Kharaman", the director with a funny name, leads a staff with fake photos on LinkedIn .
It didn't take long for fans to start anticipating this being an explicit hint that Project Abandoned was actually Silent hill, but it didn't stop there. When someone translated Turkish director Kahraman's last name on Google Translate from Turkish to Japanese, the result was, "Hideo". In addition, director's initials are "H.K", which strangely matches Hideo Kojima's Japanese initials as well.
Other evidence included Blue Box, the supposedly small Dutch studio working with 7 major studios on Project Abandoned (including a team that worked on Death Stranding previously), to Geoff Keighly (Kojima's close friend) being involved in the project on Twitter, and then using a copy of Modified from a song featured in Death Stranding, the clues sounded really interesting, prompting thousands to flock to Blue Box's Twitter account in anticipation of any further clues. Despite the studio themselves coming out to deny their ties to Kojima and Konami in an attempt to calm things down, fans have taken a plunge. They were deeply involved in conspiracy theories by that point, and they simply didn't believe it.
The final piece of the puzzle, the separate app that will provide a "real-time viewing experience" for the game, should have been the final say on this. Either we will actually get the highly anticipated Silent Hills sequel, or the project will be for a completely different game. All eyes turned towards the release date of June 25. However, question marks began to appear with the first postponement of the application until August 10, to officially begin the waiting series.
With the arrival of August 10th, belief among many that Abandoned was truly the long-awaited return of the Silent Hill horror franchise, many wanted to see for themselves. It is ten in the evening, eleven o'clock, twelve... and there is no way to run the application yet. We started to worry, were we cheated? Was it a silly joke that we had? For a while, that's what I was thinking, before the apology tweets about a "last minute technical error" started appearing.
A day, two days, three days. Many have lost faith in the project, and are no longer waiting for Blue Box's apologies. Why is it taking so long? Didn't the studio postpone the application for a whole month to prepare it? And then finally, it is announced that the Realtime Experience app is now available for the PS5. The result? A 5-second demo of the hero walking on a wooden floor... which is the same show we got on Twitter a week ago..
Look, Abandoned may still be an interesting project, and it may end up being one of the best horror experiences of our time, but I'm going to have to get off the train in this situation, as I've had enough as a Silent Hill fan of constant disappointments. You can continue to believe theories about Kharaman being a character created by Kojima, but the way the app was launched, and its very simple idea of being just a tool for displaying photos and videos inside PS5,
And the constant delays, made me lose hope that this project is from a large self-respecting studio, as it seems to me like a group of amateurs who suddenly found themselves in the spotlight and decided to continue with the mysterious marketing and benefit from it.
Sorry, dear Silent Hill fans, it looks like we won't be getting what we've been waiting for anytime soon. At least, not this year, not from Blue Box studio. The suffering continues...
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