Abandoned: Kojima’s marketing coup or project overtaken by player hype?

Game news Abandoned: Kojima’s marketing coup or project overtaken by player hype?

For those of you who didn’t follow the abandoned affair, a quick reminder of the facts. Announced in April 2020, This is survival horror exclusive to PS5 in which the player takes on the role of a man trying to escape from an inhospitable forest. Developed by Blue Box, a small independent studio based in the Netherlands, the title quickly made a name for itself, not because of its photorealistic graphics, but above all because of the mystery that surrounds it. Many see it as the hidden return of the Silent Hill saga or the upcoming Hideo Kojima game

, the man behind the newest hit line of Metal Gear for Death Stranding, who is currently working on a horror game. If you’d like to go beyond this brief summary of the situation, we invite you to consult the video chronicle at the top of the page, which goes back in more detail to all of the elements that made Abandoned a great mystery in the video game landscape of 2021. .

So after months of teasing that generated a colossal hype Blue Box will finally give players an appointment on August 10th on PlayStation 5 so that they can download certain content. In fact, it’s not really a demo, but an application that includes trailers in real time. The developers also promise a trailer that will appear this month. The date is therefore set for Tuesday, August 10th, at 9 p.m., i.e. yesterday evening. On twitter, Blue Box is fueling the hype by broadcasting a short three-second video a few minutes before the application launches shows a man walking through a house with the camera pointed. The latter appears to be wearing a khaki green jacket, an outfit that some might remember … the clothes of James Sunderland, the protagonist of Silent Hill 2.

But at 9 p.m. the tragedy is: When the application is started, the message “Come back soon ..

“. In a disaster, the developer is quick to respond to Twitter, starting at 9:14 p.m., to apologize and announce that “a technical problem with the delivery of the patch“. The developers have since tweeted this morning that “the delay is longer than expectedAn evening that gave an emotional boost to all players who were waiting to discover the truth behind this mysterious project. The interest seemed so great that even big names in the industry were bestowed on the game by Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019, now responsible for relationships with independent creators who tweeted as they did a screenshot of the page on PlayStation Store with the heading “Hmmmm“.

Despite this new false hope, many players still see Abandoned as an even more ambitious game that doesn’t pronounce its name. However, it has been several months since the developers killed themselves to reiterate that they had nothing to do with Konami or Kojima, to the point of a tweet reminding him of the Twitter account. Blue Box Studio CEO Hasan Kahraman also had to react in a video to verbally confirm this information in order to calm expectations. But all the clues surrounding the project attract far too much player attention to go unnoticed. Let us add that on top of all of those cited in our column PT, the playable demo of Silent Hills, developed by Hideo Kojima and director Guillermo del Toro, was released … on August 12, 2014. Then can we expect the Abandoned PS5 app to be available tomorrow, Thursday, August 12th, 2021? In any case, with this mystery stretching over several months, the curiosity seems to have captured many gamers since last night more than 87 Twitch channels streamed the Abandoned application in front of more than 20,000 viewers! (Source: TwitchTracker)

So is the project just an independent game that has been overwhelmed by the buzz generated by its uncomfortable teasing? Or an even more mysterious plan by Hideo Kojima than the announcement of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain? It’s hard to know at the moment what’s really behind this game, but one thing is certain: Abandoned will be talking about it again soon.