Greetings people, SanyaWaffles here. I am the creative director at Waffle Iron Studios and lead dev of Project Absentia.

People have been asking where Episode 2 of the game has been. We announced it back when for a Q2 2023 release date and outside some Twitter (and later BlueSky posts) we've been kind of radio silent.

Unfortunately we missed the mark by a long shot. We should have waited to announce we had anything until it was ready to go, or tote it as a teaser or something rather than a release timeframe.

There are several factors into this. My health was all over the place (I am disabled, I work on PA when my body and mind allow), I had to move apartments in December, and many of the people at Waffle Iron Studios and Hellforge Studios who are helping out have their own stuff going on, such as dayjobs and family and social life stuff to attend to. Some of them also have their own health issues to manage. We should (and try to) prioritize health first.

There's also the addition that I am not the best at social media. For better or worse, I don't gel with the ecosystem, and it's hard to manage a bunch of social media outlets, especially in this climate. This makes it hard for me to tease additional stuff.

When we decided to go Early Access, it was more to release the game episodically (that was when we were going for three episodes, not two).

Also game dev is hard. No matter what engine we use, no matter what budget you have.

At the end of the day, we're a small indie dev team with a small indie publisher circle and we're doing our damnest to get it out the door, but we don't want to rush our game for the sake of deadlines, and we really don't want to crunch either. We want to try to be better than mainstream games which release broken and unfinished at the expense of people's mental and physical wellbeing.

We are sorry for the lack of real development news. For transparency's sake, the game is very close to being done, but there's still content to be added, quality to assure, and bugs that need stomped out in the process.

Sincerely on behalf of Waffle Iron Studios,

SanyaWaffles