Hello, everyone!
We wanted to post an update here regarding the current development status and deactivation of the demo that was previously available.
For those of you that haven't followed the project, we announced Anathema in 2015 when indie games wishing to release on Steam required a community approval known as Steam Greenlight. During that time, the game was far from ready but we wanted community feedback if there was any interest in the game concept before we pushed forward into a lengthy development cycle. Now, the process of listing a game on Steam is much more straight-forward and does not require a community approval cycle to be listed on Steam.
In 2017, we released an early pre-alpha demo of the game in its state at that time, but still very far from completion and release. We continued to work on this project for years in our free time outside of family, friends and day-to-day life obligations. Admittedly, it has been a very slow development cycle when trying to find time outside of obligations to work on the game. In summer and fall 2024, two of our team members had health concerns that forced development to come to a complete halt. The good news is testing and health has now turned out to be fine and development can resume for the final stretch.
Now, in 2025 as we near the development finish line, a few things have become abundantly clear regarding the 2017 demo:
- It is no longer remotely close to the representation of Anathema in its current state. Significant leaps in development have been made in generally every aspect of the game.
- Since the 2017 demo's release, the Steam Deck has been released which the 2017 demo is incompatible with due to legacy FMV cut scene methods that cause termination of the demo. Cut scenes have been completely remade from scratch entirely in-engine to ensure 100% compatibility with Steam Deck without reliance of codecs. The FMV cut scenes also were hit or miss even on some Windows machines, so this was a high priority to fix in the long term. A demo that doesn't run on a very popular piece of hardware is not desirable.
In its current state, the game is somewhere around 90% completely, approximately. The gameplay segment itself is playable entirely front-to-back and cut scenes are the current focus on final voice over selections and musical scoring. Once the cut scenes are fully complete and some gameplay musical tracks brought up to par with more recent instrumental quality, they can be merged together for a complete experience with some final coats of polish (which has been heavily applied as development progressed the last couple years.) From there, it's off to external bug-testing, promotional campaigns and eventually (and finally) release.
We will be releasing an updated trailer, screenshots and demo on the store page in the future that better represents what the final product will be as we near release to tie into our promotional campaigns, but felt it necessary to deactivate the demo that is almost 8 years old (wow). Understandably, this may disappoint some, but first impressions are very important and we want players to see Anathema in its best form possible which has evolved by leaps and bounds since our initial presentation for Greenlight approval and demo release. We hope you understand and look forward to final version as much as we look forward to getting it into your hands!