Night in the Woods follow-up Revenant Hill has been canceled

Revenant Hill, the much-anticipated follow-up to indie hit Night in the Woods, has been canceled. According to development studio The Glory Society, the decision was made after members of the team were forced to step away from the project due to “recent serious health issues.”

“Making anything complex poses challenges along the way,” reads a posting on the studio’s site. It continues on to say the following:

Games take a while to make and usually require a good team working together. We’ve been lucky to have one such good team. Unfortunately, recent serious health issues have necessitated two key members stepping away from the project indefinitely. We are a small team and we each wear multiple hats. This is a loss of several hard to replace hats in an environment where all hats are needed. Given the realities of schedules, budgets, and the fraught task of reworking the whole project within those parameters, the team has amicably decided to suspend operations. For all intents and purposes, this is the end of the development of Revenant Hill.

In a separate post, artist and animator Scott Benson, who worked on both games, wrote, “Over the past 12 months or so I got very sick and it didn’t go away. 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.”

Based on the wording on the site, it sounds like The Glory Society will be on hiatus as well; a line at the top of the page reads, “The Glory Society was a worker cooperative that worked on a game called Revenant Hill.”

The game was first announced in May during a PlayStation Showcase event. While not a direct sequel, it appeared to take place in the same universe as the 2017 adventure game Night in the Woods, with a similar tone and art style. You can check out the original announcement trailer below.