Okay, this one is going to take some effort to properly explain. In short, Blue Box Games has launched the app hyping up their upcoming horror game, Abandoned, after one of the strangest launch hiccups we’ve ever seen. Kotaku reports that horror fans, however, are disappointed by the lack of… well… anything of value in the app, which consists of a short (literally seconds-long) teaser trailer and the promise of more content in the future.
This was meant to launch August 10th, which confused many fans when the app didn’t release on August 10th. It turns out, the team at Blue Box caught a graphical glitch last minute which took another two days to iron out. All of this was communicated to the public in a number of last minute (now deleted) tweets. Now that the app has actually launched, the fact that it’s twenty seconds of a dude’s lower half walking in shadow kind of feels like adding insult to injury. Don’t get me wrong: Blue Box was very clear that their app is going to be updated with more content in the future, and at no point did they even insinuate that it was going to launch as anything more than it was, but gamers were nonetheless upset with the state of the app upon release.
For those of you wondering why fans had such high hopes for this game, the answer is a little more complicated than it seems. Remember Hideo Kojima? The genius game designer responsible for the Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid franchises? Remember how Konami fired him for literally no reason, separating him from the IPs that he fathered and practically ending all hope of any more decent installments (no, you don’t count Metal Gear: Survive) in either of those series? Fans have been understandably upset about some of their favorite game series being swept under the rug and are hungry for any evidence that this isn’t the case. Well, when these folks caught wind of Abandoned, a Playstation horror exclusive centered around a mysterious protagonist surviving in a supernatural forest hell, it sounded a lot like another game they’d heard of. And so the conspiracy began.
The gamers produced a theory unlike all others: Abandoned, and all the crazy launch issues that plagued it, were all part of a viral marketing campaign by Kojima himself to announce a brand new Silent Hill! Wow, what a world that would be. If this sounds crazy, it’s probably because it is, and it’s only become more clear over time that Kojima is not involved with the game in the slightest. Rumors haven’t stopped, though, to the point that Blue Box has had to take to twitter to confirm that it is indeed real company and not just a front for that super sneaky Hideo Kojima.
Looking past all the social media nonsense, Abandoned looks to be one of the first horror experiences that will take advantage of the Playstation 5’s next-gen hardware, so horror fans should still keep an eye on this one. Abandoned does not have a release date at time of writing, but is slated for the end of 2021.