Down The Rabbit Hole
It’s been probably the most bizarre gaming story of the year thus far: A small indie studio announced their upcoming horror game with a brief, cryptic trailer that showed off a few of the locations to be featured. What followed was an internet storm, turning what was a simple game release into a deep conspiracy involving PSN trophies, Turkish translations and the alleged mastermind himself, Hideo Kojima. It seems that the mystery surrounding Blue Box will soon be solved, as the first full trailer for Abandoned is due to launch in the next few weeks.
It all began when Blue Box Game Studios made a cryptic Tweet: “Guess the name: Abandoned = (First letter S, Last letter L)”. This set the internet down a conspiracy rabbit hole, digging into the company’s past to try to find any link with what they assumed the secret name was: Silent Hill. Along the way, there were a strange amount of coincidences discovered involving Hideo Kojima, the developer of the canceled Silent Hills title, though nothing truly concrete has been discovered quite yet. The conspiracy itself is long and has a lot of evidence both for and against it so take anything you hear with a grain of salt, but keep in mind – This wouldn’t be the first time Kojima has dabbled in using fake game companies to secretly promote his games.
What have we actually heard about Abandoned from the developers themselves? Well, not much – So far, all we really know is that it’ll be a survival horror game (hence the tweet that set everything off, they say) about evading a religious cult in the woods, and that there’ll be a deep gunplay system that reflect the main character being untrained. We’d hoped to find out more when the Abandoned Trailers App was initially meant to launch earlier in June before being delayed on the day it was scheduled to release. Now, however, we know exactly when the app will launch, and that it’ll be followed in August by a full trailer.
The Abandoned Trailers App will be available to preload for free on PlayStation 5 on July 29th.