Sherlock Holmes studio Frogwares is making a new game, despite the war

pcgamer.com:

Like other Ukrainian developers, Sherlock Holmes studio Frogwares was affected by the ongoing Russian invasion of the country—effectively making it impossibly to continue working. Fortunately, a «MegaGrant» from Epic Games helped the studio soften the financial blow and move staff out of active warzones.

All that said, Frogwares today announced it was completely pivoting to a brand new project—and only partially out of sheer stubborn spite.

«We are revealing the game now in this way to simply show people we are pushing on and also as a clear middle finger to those who thought they could just roll into our country hoping to disrupt and ruin our lives,» communications officer Sergey Oganesyan wrote in a press release.

Currently named Project Palianytsia, the new game is described as a mix of eldritch horror coupled with Victorian-era mystery, very much in the vein of The Sinking City. The release came with four pieces of concept art, showing off a library, a storm-wracked lighthouse, a creepy swamp hut and a fog-shrouded English manor.

Palianytsia sounds like it'll be more limited in scope than Frogwares' recent releases—though, as Oganesyan notes, that's a harsh reality of development during wartime, where continuing to create games of the scale it was used to would be a tough ask.

«Do we go ahead with a large scope project and risk disruption, have less room for R&D and innovation, less access to your highly skilled staff, and have smaller pre-production and development of specific tools? Or perhaps we can be smarter about this, and create a project with an easier turnaround and a tighter scope—but still ambitious, packed with quality, and with great storytelling and mystery behind it. This way, we can not only make a