Revenant Hill, an adventure game about cute animals and shitty landlords, was supposed to be the next project from the makers of the critically-acclaimed 2017 GOTY contender, Night in the Woods. Today, indie collective The Glory Society announced it would effectively be canceled following unexpected medical complications for one of its developers.
“Over the past 12 months or so I got very sick and it didn’t go away,” tweeted writer and artist Scott Benson on November 7. “Eventually I was diagnosed with severe heart failure, most likely from a virus. It will continue to greatly limit me for the foreseeable future and as such I’ve had to stop working in the manner I once did.”
Benson and partner Bethany Hockenberry co-wrote Night in the Woods together and went on to form the worker collective game studio The Glory Society with musician Wren Farren in 2019. Following Night in the Woods, a rustbelt mystery about a college dropout that won the Best Indie Game and Games for Impact categories at the 2017 Game Awards, The Glory Society revealed Revenant Hill earlier this year at Sony’s big May PlayStation showcase.
The narrative-driven adventure game would focus on a cat named Twigs who is forced to find a new home after failing to make rent. “Times are hard, making ends meet is harder, and the world doesn’t stop at the edge of the graveyard,” the game’s description read. “Something big and dark is at work in the towns, the factories, in the forests and hills. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to push back.”
The Glory Society now says that delivering on that vision will unfortunately no longer be possible as Benson and Hockenberry (his wife) step back from production. “Given the reality of schedules, budgets, and the fraught task of reworking the whole project within those parameters, the team has amicably decided to suspend operations,” the studio announced today. “For all intents and purposes, this is the end of the development of Revenant Hill.”
The tone of the message makes it sound like the collective itself will be moving on as well. In the meantime, Benson said he’s working on his recovery before deciding what’s next. “Past few months are a blur of hospitals, doctors, tests, procedures, exciting new medications, and so, so much blood drawn,” he tweeted. “I’m sad about all of this. But on my end getting too upset about it is like getting angry at bad weather. This just happened. Life thankfully goes on.”
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