Aragami studio Lince Works is closing: 'The last couple of years have been particularly difficult'

pcgamer.com:

Lince Works, the Barcelona-based developer of the Aragami games, has announced that it is halting development of its current projects and closing its doors for good.

Aragami(opens in new tab) and Aragami 2(opens in new tab) are third-person stealth games that put players in the jika-tabi of a supernatural ninja protecting his people from invading armies. They weren't huge hits but they were well-received on Steam, where they hold positive user rankings. In September 2022, a year after the release of Aragami 2, Lince Works announced that it was «time to move on and shift our focus towards brand-new adventures(opens in new tab).»

But now that's not going to happen. 

«The last couple of years have been particularly difficult as we shifted towards the development of new IPs and a new course for the company,» Lince Works said today(opens in new tab). «We were ambitious about what we wanted to achieve as a studio, but sadly, although we made good progress, the economic context was not favorable and we ran out of time.

»It breaks our hearts to know that all the work we have done for the past year will ultimately not come to a completion."

The closure announcement comes as a surprise, as Lince Works was still hiring(opens in new tab) less than two months ago. There's no indication about what the studio had been working on in its post-Aragami phase, as the currently posted job listings(opens in new tab), for senior AI and gameplay programmer positions, say only that they will help «bring our next projects to life by implementing new gameplay features to meet project design goals.»

While the announcement was made today, Lince Works won't formally shut down until sometime in April. The studio assured Aragami fans that both games