Frostpunk developers share new details of Project 8, their ill-fated fantasy game about grieving

11 Bit Studios have shared new details and images of their untitled Project 8, a mournful third-person action-adventure that was cancelled last year amid layoffs. CEO Przemysław Marszał observed at the time that "it was conceived under very different market conditions, when narrative-driven, story-rich games held stronger appeal" - a comment that made me want to unplug the internet and crawl into bed with a choose-your-own-adventure book. Now, Marszał has offered a fuller account of the cancellation.

All this comes from a Eurogamer report penned by Prince Robert of Purchese. According to the report, Project 8's main character was a slender, masculine figure equipped with a slingshot you could use to distract threats. Set in a colourful fantasy world, the game would have focussed on stealth, climbing and environmental puzzling rather than combat. Its story was a process of working through the five stages of grief after losing a loved one. In brief, it sounds like a mixture of Gris, Prince of Persia, and the recent South of Midnight.

So why was it abandoned? According to Marszał, 11 Bit were overambitious about moving into the third-person action-adventure genre, having expanded their workforce dramatically off the back of Frostpunk's success. With little direct experience to call upon, the Project 8 team struggled with both the relatively arcane 'stages of grief' concept and more familiar difficulties, like how to make hiding from enemies enjoyable. All this was, of course, exacerbated by wider factors such as the Covid pandemic.

"We felt like it would be possible to do another game in a totally different genre, with a bit of a crazy difficult topic, with a new team," Marszał told the site. "And it was a bit too optimistic to be honest. We thought a lot about it so it wasn't like 'hey let's do it', but going back, it was a bit too optimistic, and thinking that games are easy. And making games isn't easy. It's very difficult stuff."

According to Marszał, Project 8 faced frequent delays over the course of "seven or eight years" in development. After all that time, the only playable parts of the game were a prologue and a level themed around the emotion of denial, which feels rather on-the-nose as poetic ironies go. "And when we heard that we need to add another year or two to the production time it was like 'wow'," Marszał went on.

Following this proposed delay, 11 Bit considered Project 8's odds of success against wider market conditions at the time. In particular, they looked at the reception for similar emotive or psychological action-adventure games, such as Senua's Saga: Hellblade II and A Plague Tale: Requiem. They eventually came to the conclusion that they would lose money selling the game.

"We allowed ourselves - that was the optimism - to do too difficult a game," Marszał concludes in the piece. "It had a cool premise but that wasn't wise, especially for a team that was doing the game as a first game. It was just too ambitious. It was multiple aspects that, at the end, we knew, no, we won't make it. Either [cancel it] or we will spend another tens of millions of dollars and fail heavily."

A number of 11 Bit staffers were slated to lose their jobs alongside Porject 8's cancellation, though some appear to have been transferred to other projects. Marszał has now confirmed that 18 people were let go. If you're one of them, I hope you've found your feet elsewhere.