Late last December, 11 bit studios, the Polish developer of This War of Mine and the Frostpunk series, announced it had cancelled a long-in-development console-focused game known as Project 8. This had been in development since 2018 and had cost the studio nearly £10m. Until now, though, all we’ve known about Project 8 was that it was a “narrative-driven, story-rich game” – CEO Przemysław Marszał used those words when referencing the game’s genre, which he said held stronger market appeal when it was conceived. And now that I’ve seen the cancelled game in action, I have a better idea of what he meant.
Project 8 was a significant departure for a studio known for gritty strategy games that are thick with moral dilemmas. A two-minute gameplay video taken from a milestone prototype build and shown to me by Marszał, reveals a third-person action game in a bright, colourful, fantasy world. Project 8 had deeper themes running through it – the overriding idea was for players to move through the five stages of grief after losing a loved one – but the overall style and action-focused gameplay was unlike anything 11 bit studios has ever done.
In Project 8, you played as a slender, masculine character with pale skin and long dark hair, whose body was half-covered by a kind of magical wrapping or bandage, which could detach from their arm to serve as a kind of weapon. They also carried a slingshot for distracting and harming enemies, reminiscent of the slingshot in the A Plague Tale series – a series Marszał references while talking about the game. The focus of Project 8 was stealth rather than straight-up combat, with climbing and traversal, and environmental puzzle solving, usually in relation to strange obelisks found floating around the world – a world full of oversized plants and unusual creatures.
The demo reminds me, by turns, of Prince of Persia, Rime, A Plague Tale and Hellblade – another series Marszał references. Oh and the more recent South of Midnight. “When we look at it, it does look a bit like South of Midnight – with less fighting,” Marszał says.
So what went wrong?
Marszał says there are three reasons Project 8 was ultimately cancelled, but to understand them properly, we have to go back in time a bit, to a period just after Frostpunk 1 was released, in 2018. That game did very well for 11 bit, as This War of Mine had four years earlier, so the company was flush with cash. And that meant growth. “We scaled up everywhere,” Marszał says. “From the company that was around 90 [people], we scaled up to – currently it’s around 280. It was crazy growth. Very optimistic. We had a lot of money from This War of Mine. We had a lot of money from Frostpunk – it sold crazy again. We had a lot of money and what to do now?” The answer was to take a risk.