Well, this is pretty great news: It turns out Allison Road, the promising indie horror project and spiritual successor to PT, is back in business after being cancelled a few months back.
Despite a joint statement on the cancellation from developer Lilith Ltd and former publisher Team17, fans were kind of kept in the dark, as both parties would only say it was time to ‘end the collaboration’.
Well that’s clearly all in the past, as creator Christian Kesler has announced that Allison Road has been resurrected, and he’s created a new studio called Far From Home.
Talking to IGN, Kesler revealed:
I’m actually really happy to be able to announce that [Allison Road] will continue. We had a lot of support online and some folks out there are just incredibly nice.
Of course as you might imagine, it took a little bit of time off and distance before he felt ready to come back to the project that was so unceremoniously canceled.
He explained:
It did take a bit of soul searching to find the drive again to work on Allison Road and to simply make a call on what to do next. After the setback, I took a bit of a break from working on it and reevaluated all the work that had been done so far–the whole journey, so to speak. I started making a few (in my opinion) necessary changes to the story and the flow, little bits and pieces here and there, and before I knew it, it sort of naturally came back to life.
It turns out that this time, Kesler will work on Allison Road alone, and only bring help on board if it’s absolutely necessary – thankfully, it seems that all the difficult parts of development were finished before the game was canned.
It’s unclear what he plans to do in terms of publishing the game at the moment. Allison Road was previously a crowdfunded project before being picked up by Team17, so perhaps Kesler will return to that model?
At any rate, we can be glad that one of the most promising looking indie horrors around is back from the dead – let’s hope it stays this time.
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.