It’s not hard to find the conspiracy theories surrounding Abandoned and Blue Box Studios, just search “Kojima’’ on Twitter for plenty of memes and speculation. You could also check out the subreddit dedicated to the whole thing TheBlueBoxConspiracy. And I have to say, the evidence isn’t too bad. Blue Box kicked off the whole thing by posting, “Abandoned = (First letter S, Last letter L)”, in a Tweet that’s now been deleted. The devs also mention that their game will feature “snowflakes of blood”, which was also said in PT teasers. Plus, the Blue Box YouTube channel banner is literally a picture of some hills. There’s a good roundup of all the weirdness so far on the aforementioned subreddit, some of the connections are… loose, but interesting nonetheless. All of this could be Blue Box trying to capitalise on Silent Hill excitement, which honestly, I think that’s about as deep as this goes. But one piece of “evidence” that could convince me is that Blue Box studio director Hasan Kahraman’s surname is Hideo translated into Turkish. We know that weird naming stuff isn’t beyond Kojima, after he used a fake studio and an anagram of his own name, Joakim, to tease Metal Gear Solid 5. The plot thickens. Omg, I’ve also just clocked that the developers’ Twitter handle is “@BBGameStudios” which could be a reference to BB the baby you carry around in Death Stranding. It’s absolutely not, because that would be daft (buy hey, this conspiracy stuff is fun!). Given the number of Tweets that Blue Box have deleted that relate to Silent Hill in any way, and the multiple statements they’ve given denying the link to Kojima’s games, it seems to me a lot of this was a marketing tactic gone-awry. “We have no relations with Konami. Silent Hill is owned by Konami. We do not have any relations with Hideo Kojima. It was never our intention to tease the name as Silent Hill. We sincerely apologize for this,” they Tweeted last week. Seems pretty final! Abandoned is set to release on PS5 later this year, and the devs recently did a vague Tweet suggesting it could come to PC too. They’re set to reveal some gameplay this Friday, so perhaps it’ll be more clear then what Abandoned actually is. In the meantime, you can find out more about it on the PlayStation blog. But what do you reckon, reader? Is it all Silent Hill references that went a bit too far? Or will Kojima jump out from Abandoned’s ominous woods yelling “surprise!”? Get your votes in now.
