Allison Road, the promising first-person horror game and “spiritual successor” to P.T was cancelled earlier this month.
Publisher Team17 has now released a statement addressing the cancellation of the title, which was being developed by indie studio Lilith Ltd.
Speaking to VG247, Team17 said:
After a long consideration between Lilith owner Chris Kesler and ourselves, we have reached a mutual agreement to end our collaboration on publishing Allison Road under Team17’s Games label.
We love the concept and value Chris’s talent highly, but sometimes things pan out differently than expected, as game development and publishing have so many layers of complexity.
The whole team here wish all the best to Chris on his current and future projects for which, before being a business [partners of], we are also a fan.
That’s all lovely, but it doesn’t really answer the question of why the game was canned.
Lillith Ltd first broke the news of the cancellation on Twitter, promising that more details would eventually follow.
The developer later posted an update to the Allison Road Facebook page, but it’s as frustratingly vague as Team17’s own statement.
In fact, it’s essentially exactly the same:
After a long consideration between Team17 and ourselves, we have reached a mutual agreement to end our collaboration on publishing Allison Road under Team17’s Games label. Sometime things pan out differently than expected as game development and publishing have so many layers of complexity… We’d like to especially thank everyone for their support through-out, it has and will always be appreciated!
Allison Road started life as a Kickstarter project in 2015, aiming to fill the horror void that Konami left when they cancelled Silent Hills.
Not long after that, the crowdfunding campaign was abandoned and the development team signed a publishing deal with Worms developer Team17.
It’s clear that something broke down between the developer and publisher, but it’d be pretty classless for either one to go out and trash the other. It could be years, if ever, before we find out what really happened.
It’s unclear whether or not Allison Road could find another publisher or return to the crowdfunding format – for now, Lillith Ltd probably just need some time to take stock.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.