All Articles: Allison Road

Allison Road, a first-person horror game partly inspired by Hideo Kojima’s PT/Silent Hills, was canceled under mysterious circumstances by developer Lilith and publisher Team17 back in June. However, yesterday, project lead Christian Kesler told IGN that the game is back in development… though it might be a very long time before we see the finished product.

Part of the reason for Allison Road’s under-the-radar return is that Kesler has decided to continue working on the game by himself:

“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,” Kesler told IGN. “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.”

Kesler explained that his desire to resurrect Allison Road partially came about after an extended break and a reevaluation of the game’s progress so far:

“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 told IGN. “After the set back, 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.”

Allison Road is currently in development for the PC and will be released as soon as Kesler can finish it (which, again, likely won’t be anytime soon).

A few weeks ago, Lilith revealed that Allison Road, their first-person horror game partially inspired by PT/Silent Hills, had been canceled. Earlier this weekend, the development team supplied something of an explanation for the unexpected news on Facebook:

After a long consideration between Team17 and ourselves, we have reached a mutual agreement to end our collaboration on publishing Allison Road under Team17’s Games label.

Sometime things pan out differently than expected as game development and publishing have so many layers of complexity… We’d like to especially thank everyone for their support through-out, it has and will always be appreciated!

There’s no beating around the bush here… Lilith’s “explanation” for the cancellation is extremely vague and doesn’t explain much of anything. In all likelihood, Allison Road, like PT/Silent Hills before it, will become one of those games where the mystery of “What happened?” can never fully be explained. It’s sad that it had to happen to such a promising-looking title, but it’s the way of the world sometimes.

UPDATE: Publisher Team17 sent a similarly-worded statement to VG247 earlier this morning. We still don’t know what happened.

Allison Road, a terrifying first-person trip through a haunted house, was originally created as a hobby project by developer Chris Kesler. After a strong reply from the gaming community (and many comparisons to Hideo Kojima’s PT/Silent Hills), Kesler announced his intentions to build a team and release Allison Road as a full game.

Kesler’s team, Lilith, launched a Kickstarter campaign on September 21 to help fund the game’s ongoing development. But here we are three weeks later and the team is ready to deliver some good news… they’re canceling the campaign! In a Kickstarter Update posted yesterday, the developer revealed that they’ve signed a publishing agreement with Team17. The UK-based publishing label will provide Lilith with funding and development support, as well as giving Kesler and his team every opportunity to make Allison Road the best game it can be.

With a publisher in place, Lilith plans to “go quiet for a while,” but we’ll surely hear more about Allison Road before its late 2016 release on the PC.