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Everyone at EX was out this week for diverse reasons (vacation, wedding, board game convention), so we’re doing a shorter send this time around. Back to normal next week!

One man’s career-long struggle against the ghost of Silent Hill

For an indie horror dev, Artur Laczkowski — the Polish developer behind Hitori De Productions, as well as the now-defunct Jukai Studio — has had an unusually turbulent career. A brief timeline of events:

• Laczkowski used to work for Bloober Team, the oft-derided studio behind the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake
• He also published his own recreation of Hideo Kojima’s 2014 cult hit P.T. (a “playable teaser” for a canceled Silent Hill game that Konami notoriously removed from the PlayStation Store in 2015, making it impossible to access). It was free to download on itch.io until 2020, when he started gating it behind his Patreon paywall
• After his time at Bloober, he became the director of Jukai Studio, who released their debut title — Stray Souls, which IGN described as a “paint-by-numbers Silent Hill clone” — last October to largely negative reviews
• Meanwhile, in November, Laczkowski started teasing the release of another game called Supernormal under the Hitori De Productions moniker. It was billed as a “spiritual successor” to the canceled project Allison Road, which was itself a “spiritual successor” to P.T.
• Jukai eventually shuttered that December, citing both poor reception to Stray Souls and the controversies surrounding Laczkowski, who received criticism for “liking” racist and transphobic tweets
• In January, however, Supernormal was released to fairly positive reviews on Steam; reception to its follow-up, last month’s Supernatural, has been much more mixed

When evaluated in total, Laczkowski’s history with Silent Hill-likes starts to resemble the story of a man who’s haunted by the ghost of a once-beloved horror game franchise. P.T.’s un-release in 2015 left a hole in the horror-liker’s heart that still hasn’t been filled, especially as releases like the universally panned Silent Hill Ascension continue to disappoint the series’ longtime fans. The real victim, however, may be Laczkowski, who seems doomed to an eternity of producing pale imitations of Silent Hill games using Unreal Engine 5.