Tim Soret, creator of upcoming cyberpunk sidescroller The Last Night announced on Twitter that the game’s production had run into massive “legal and funding issues”, while development studio Odd Tales have also cancelled a scheduled trailer.
Initially slated for release in 2018, Soret described The Last Night as a “cinematic adventure game” which - judging from E3 2017 footage - actually looked quite promising: highly stylised menus, a richly coloured 2.5D world and a synthy soundtrack got cyberpunk-loving hearts in the audience pumping. Everything appeared polished, and development, on a surface level at least, appeared to be going smoothly.
However, as we have learned in the past decade, trailers released during E3 are often unrepresentative of the final product, with graphics downgrades and pre-rendered cutscenes becoming more prevalent each year.
With The Last Night already appearing to be mismanaged financially, it appears that nobody will truly know when, or if it will be released
This reveal was explained to be early pre-alpha footage, which may have given hints all the way back in 2017 that the road to release for The Last Night was not going to be easy.
Could one infer from this that the reveal trailer was rushed to generate hype and investments for an already struggling game? Perhaps. It was not only this that could have revealed that development was less than perfect. The game's listed release date on Steam was changed to ‘TBA’ months ago, already signalling that perhaps the project was running out of juice.
Soret has announced that Odd Tales are looking for further investors to continue funding the project - how much money this actually entails is a mystery, but with The Last Night already appearing to be mismanaged financially, it appears that nobody will truly know when, or if it will be released.
It seems we just have to keep our fingers crossed, and wait.