People Can Fly are best known for Bulletstorm, the raunchy, gleefully over the top first person shooter/action game published by Epic Games that let you dispose of your enemies in increasingly imaginative ways, but before there was Bulletstorm, they were working on another game with THQ, a very different kind of game from Bulletstorm.
“The problem with the game was that it was very hard to explain,” former People Can Fly leader Adrian Chmielarz said to Eurogamer, “in a way that it mixed noire, survival-horror, adventure, thriller, love story… The closest I can give you would be a more streamlined LA Noire – LA Noire meets Uncharted, in a way.
“You are a private eye and you start a normal investigation, but it turns out that there are some otherworldly powers at work, and you can communicate with the dead.”
“It was moody as f***,” Chmielarz added, “an incredibly moody game. Great narration, third-person perspective like Resident Evil mixed with LA Noire, and full of surprises.”
Unfortunately, it seems the game got caught in the crossfire of THQ’s incessant re-organizing in that period.
“THQ was reorganising, withdrawing from Europe,” he said. “They were supposed to leave just one title and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was way more advanced at this point – close to release – and we were one-third in.
“THQ seriously f***ed us over at this point,” he added. “They just cancelled. ‘OK we’re just cancelling the game – see ya.’ It’s all corporate bulls***; three weeks before, they cancelled all communication – no phone calls, stopped answering emails. Absolute a**holes.”
It sounds like it was going to be a very interesting game, and it would have been worth to see how the concept was executed, if nothing else. Hopefully People Can Fly can revive the project at some point in the future.