tell me about your favourite abandoned games!

[fairyrune]

there's a few games that i mourn these days. i think there's something magical about the imagined potential of a project; theories and expectations can be endless, unlike the actual material content of a game. look at final fantasy versus xiii as a great example. that game, though it never came out in its original form, has its own fan-base.

there's one particular game that made me think about starting this thread - book of travels.

book of travels was a very unique online game. primarily a point-and-click rpg, book of travels saw the player almost never interacting with other players on their server. the idea was that each interaction between players would then feel special and, in many cases for me, it did! even if i didn't team up with them, it made me smile to see someone walk by. another aspect of interaction that made it different from many other games is that there is no chat log; players must interact using gestures and symbols. as someone who grew up on the endless forest, this was easy to get used to, but it's a bit of a hurdle when we're so used to using words!

book of travels takes place in a world that feels like a fairy-tale - not the disney-ified sort, but real, ancient tales that are full of danger and cultural quirks. the braided shore is a world that, to me, felt very lived in. from the clothing, to the language, to the music, everything felt as though it fitted into an organic "web" of culture; my favourite part was that people communicated not through text, but complex knotted string or strips of fabric. it felt so fresh in a way i find difficult to describe.

unfortunately, the team behind the game - might and delight - had to downscale their studio and their projects. book of travels isn't being actively worked on anymore, though the servers will remain live for the foreseeable. it's my greatest wish that, in time, they find the resources to resume their development of the game; only about 25% of the map is available to players currently, and so much of the intrigue remains unexplored. book of travels was such a great game that demanded patience and peace from its players in a world where games seem to move at hyper-speed. perhaps this doesn't necessarily count as "abandoned", but i think it counts for the purpose of the discussion.

so - tell me about your favourite abandoned game, whether that means that it no longer receives any updates, or that it's in what is known as maintenance mode. functionally-complete games are exempt in my opinion, but i can't stop ya

[Melooon]

I have a long standing interest in The Untitled Game (TUG) from 2014 - I might be one of the 5 people who actually still own a copy on Steam. It was a generic survival game that ended up as vaporware - but there's just something about the mood of it that always stuck with me. It actually looks very slimier to the book of travels, maybe there's something haunted about these adventure survival games.

The game itself was not good, it was not fun to play, and if you install it from steam today, it takes about 40 minutes to launch for some reason and if you quit, the game will corrupt itself and you have to reinstall it again - but all of that adds to the mystery of TUG 

I'm sure some people are annoyed about TUG, the developers website is now offline - it seems like it finally imploded around 2017; it was Kickstarted and it stole everyone's money - they were working on a follow up project called TUG 2, but all videos of it have been deleted. History will not remember TUG, or those who created it, but I remember it 

[candycanearter07]

Well, there is exactly one game that I really remember that is abandoned now that I'm super nostalgic for and its Sonic Network Land. I think I've talked about it before but it had such a good vibe, like its just a sandbox of a bunch of classic sonic levels but theres no risk of dying and stuff and everything is unlocked and some of the characters were way op or underpowered and I miss hanging out there...