What’s Even Real Anymore?
Since its announcement back in April, the upcoming PlayStation 5 survival horror game Abandoned has been the subject of a grand conspiracy, alleging a link between developers Blue Box Studios and Hideo Kojima. While there’s been plenty of baseless speculation around the whole situation, it’s hard to deny that there’s a whole lot of coincidences that would make a lot more sense if the two were connected. Now, with Abandoned’s ‘Realtime Experience App’ due to launch tomorrow, Blue Box’s founder Hasan Kahraman has raised a few more eyebrows with his involvement in an upcoming podcast.
On July 27th, the Arabic video game podcast Al Hub started announcing the guests, sponsors, and prizes that will be on offer in their 100th episode. Among the guests is Hasan Kahraman himself, which isn’t all that unusual – but the announcement of the first sponsor has caused some of those following the Blue Box conspiracy to think that an announcement of some kind may be made during the podcast.
The first sponsor revealed was none other than Konami – the company currently in control of the Silent Hill IP. Given the previous hints of Abandoned being a secret Silent Hill title, possibly even Kojima’s return to the franchise after parting ways with Konami, this reveal has got some theorists convinced of the conspiracy’s truth.
Recently, Blue Box made another cryptic announcement – the Realtime Trailer App, which would be used to… load trailers for the game, apparently, has been renamed to the Realtime Experience App. Again, this has got people thinking about Silent Hill, hearkening back to the release of Kojima’s P.T., a playable teaser for his canceled Silent Hills project that was intentionally made to look like an unrelated indie game until the end of the teaser.
The Abandoned Realtime Experience App will be available to preload for free on July 29th, after a strange rename and a last-minute delay from its initial announced release date of June 25th. The first trailer for Abandoned will be launched through this app on August 10.