Firesprite Studios was working on a new horror title in the vein of Dead Space, but Sony ultimately killed the project – and it was not the only one from the studio that ended up being scrapped.

Sony has spent the past few years cancelling a striking number of internal projects, and it now looks like Firesprite Studios was hit harder than many realized. The studio had already been tied to the cancelled Twisted Metal battle royale, but a new report points to another lost project that sounds far more interesting. This time, it is a sci-fi horror game whose tone and visual style reportedly resembled Dead Space.

Based on the available details, the game was in development between 2018 and 2020, but never made it beyond the prototype stage. Concept art from the project showed dark futuristic environments and grotesque monsters, which means the foundations were clearly there for Sony to build a serious first-party sci-fi horror property. That makes the cancellation sting even more, because PlayStation does not exactly have an abundance of big internal projects in that space.

Firesprite Lost More Than Just One Project

And that was not the end of it. The same report says Sony also cancelled a Breaking Bad-based VR game that was in development at Firesprite. That project was supposed to be a narrative experience for PSVR 2, and even Vince Gilligan, the creator of the series, was said to be involved. Rather than focusing on traditional action or deeper gameplay systems, the game would have taken players through the show’s iconic locations. Sony pulled the plug on it early, despite the fact that millions of dollars had reportedly already been spent on its development.

What makes this look worse is that these do not seem like isolated incidents. Sony has already shut down multiple internal projects over the course of the PlayStation 5 generation, and the growing pattern suggests the company has burned through a lot of studio time, money, and creative energy on games that never got anywhere. From the player perspective, that is especially frustrating because the first-party lineup has also looked increasingly thin as a result.

The one positive note is that Firesprite itself is still alive and is currently working on a narrative horror game for PlayStation 5. So the studio’s horror ambitions are not dead yet. The real question is whether that current project will actually make it through, or whether it too will end up buried in the long graveyard of half-finished Sony ideas.

Source: Tech4Gamers