It's been a few months since we last heard anything about the PT-inspired horror game Allison Road, mainly because the last thing we heard was that it had been canceled. But today, creator Christian Kesler told IGN that work on the game has resumed under the banner of a new studio called Far From Home.
PT is short for “playable teaser,” which was a brief demo for Silent Hills that appeared on the PlayStation Store in 2014. Konami's deteriorating relationship with Hideo Kojima led to it being pulled (and buried), but in a classic example of the Streisand Effect in action, that only added to its mystique. Some fans sought to recreate the demo in perfect detail, while Kesler aimed to capture the essence of the experience in something (relatively) new. He launched a Kickstarter for Allison Road in 2015, but canceled it before completion when Team 17 offered to publish the game—an arrangement that ultimately fell through.
“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,” Kesler said. “After the setback, I took a bit of a break from working on it and re-evaluated 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.”
Kesler didn't offer any new insights into what led to the breakup with Team 17 and the subsequent dissolution of Lilith, the team that had been working on the game, but he did express confidence in his ability to finish Allison Road on his own. “For our gameplay trailer, I did all the modeling, texturing, shaders, lighting, etc., and thankfully a lot of the mechanics are already implemented from the previous development phase, so I can comfortably take the game forward by myself,” he said. “If and when it comes to a point where new features and mechanics are required, or old ones need changing, I'll go look for support.”
There's no indication of a release target at this point, and the Allison Road website doesn't appear to have been updated since before the cancellation. The Twitter and Facebook pages have sprung back to life, though, so for now, you can follow along there.
