A personal update on our game, The Simulation: Our chapter with Blumhouse Games has ended. We’re grateful for their support and involvement in the game; we wouldn’t have come this far without them. The game and its future are back in our hands, and development is continuing independently. The Simulation has been kept in almost complete secrecy since 2021, and most of what we’ve shared has been rather cryptic. That is because the mechanic and story at its heart are what we’ve been protecting all these years. When we fully announce it (so far we've only teased a few things here and there), we want to be sure we can follow that announcement with a game that matches the ambition behind it. We also want to do it at the right time. Keeping it mostly secret has been exciting, terrifying and, honestly, incredibly anxiety inducing, especially after having working sections of the game for so long. When you’re building something original, it’s hard to “genre-fy” it. I could throw a collection of genre tags at it (psychological horror, adventure, puzzles, mystery, science fiction, retro-horror, narrative) but none of them really describes what the game is. What ties everything together is an original core mechanic that we’ve spent years developing and refining across a wide range of levels, ideas and art styles. Honestly, it's incredibly ambitious. The ambition isn’t about sheer scale or feature count. More isn't better feature-wise (from my perspective). This will not be a game with a thousand systems and underdeveloped narrative content competing for attention. It’s ambitious in what it wants to give to the players. I believe a game should be a gift. And it's also ambitious in a design-driven sense: A focused set of fully developed, original, interconnected ideas explored in ways that are genuinely new, that feel intuitive, fun and polished. Every level is unique and handcrafted around those ideas. There is no filler content. Everything is there for a reason. More than anything, I hope players experience that magical and mysterious feeling of discovery that games gave us a long time ago, when everything was still new. And hopefully, open a few windows and doors that, as they say, "move the medium forward". I like to think, and this is part of our studio’s ethos, that “A successful experiment can become an innovative project, but that is only the beginning.” We took all the creative risks we could. We found something unique that deserved to be developed, but finding it was only the beginning of the hard journey of making the game. All of this may sound like marketing soup, but I genuinely don’t know how to say more about it without risking saying too much at the wrong the time. The project began taking shape in 2021 through an experimental Flat + VR concept in Unreal 4.27, and a story idea I became extremely passionate about. That experiment helped us find the mechanic, and the game, that we’d been searching for. We began building it fully for PC and consoles in 2022 (in Unreal 5.0, lol). Everything since has been about finding its perfect form. After all this time, the particular combination at the heart of the game still feels distinctly ours, and we’re incredibly proud of that. Below are a few clips and screenshots from the game. Some are old, and some may never represent the final version, but all of them belong to something we’ve quietly carried for years. The game already has a two-to-three-hour, RC-quality vertical slice, plus much more content in different stages of development. It is a big production for a small team. We're analyzing different funding and release strategies for the future, as we adapt to a very different, challenging industry. So keep in mind that many things could change. We’re already speaking with publishers we admire, and we’ll be at Gamescom. We hope to announce the game properly soon, with the right partner or independently if that’s what it takes. If this sounds like your kind of strange, ambitious indie game, please follow us, wishlist, and help us make some noise. We’re going to need you. store.steampowered.com/app/3…