The 2014 Kickstarter success story, Pathalogic, has taken a surprise turn during its development. Having taken on the support of publisher tinyBuild, the game is now set to be called Pathalogic 2 and will be transitioning into a more open development model. That means that new builds can be expected to be delivered regularly to the community as we move towards the game's eventual release in 2018.
The original Pathalogic was a psychological horror adventure game with survival elements, developed by Ice Pick Lodge in 2005. An HD remake was released in 2015, but a Kickstarter campaign that pulled in $333,000 for a reimagining of what the original game was all about has been running along in the background since 2014.
Development has stumbled a lot since then. What once was promised to arrive by the end of November, didn't yet have a firm date even as we edge towards the end of 2017. That's where tinyBuild comes in.
Having successfully shipped games like Punch Club and Hello Neighbor, it's bringing some of its expertise to bear on the project and is supporting it as a publisher. It has renamed the game Pathalogic 2, to help differentiate it from the original and its HD remake for new fans and will be pushing out regular builds so that the community feels like they're getting somewhere and can feel the progress with their own gaming hands.
Perhaps most crucially though, tinyBuild has set a firm 2018 release date for the game.
In the more immediate future, a preview of the first Alpha build will be shown off at PAXWest in Seattle and if it goes down well, that's the first one which will be released to Kickstarter backers.