Nearly two years after its last update and more than 10 years after it was Kickstarted to the tune of $660,126, the developers behind beleaguered strategy game Unsung Story have returned to declare it's "getting back on track."
Unsung Story is not the biggest failure in gaming Kickstarter history—that honor may belong to Clang, which pulled in more than half a million dollars in 2012 and was declared dead two years later. But I don't think any other Kickstarted game can match Unsung Story's bizarre and grueling saga, from being put on hold in 2016, sold to another studio, and finally released in a limited early access form in 2020 to practically zero fanfare. That release has been hanging over the heads of developer Little Orbit for the last four years, its recent update revealed.
"We shipped what we thought was a great start to the final game," Little Orbit CEO Matthew Scott wrote. "But we were wrong."
"Unfortunately, while there were a couple areas that players liked, most of the feedback from early access was overwhelmingly negative. In fact it put the project into a super weird limbo: Chapter 1 was clearly bad enough that continuing with the game direction was only going to disappoint the backers and fans of the project, but it wasn't so bad that I felt we should abandon the whole thing."
Despite the initial appeal of design and story work from Final Fantasy Tactics creator Yasumi Matsuno, Unsung Story probably should have been abandoned years ago when original developer Playdek called it quits. Matsuno's direct involvement ended when that initial development petered out in 2016, though Scott explained in 2021 that the rebooted game is still inspired by his design documents. But Little Orbit is nothing if not tenacious, and has spent the last four years trying to overhaul its poorly received initial release while also just… surviving.
"2023 was rough for our studio or the game industry overall. I'm not going to detail all of our struggles here, but when things take a downturn, the effects can be disastrous across the board," Scott wrote, saying that unpaid work for a partner left the studio "hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole." Little Orbit was working on rectifying the issues with the early access build in 2021 and 2022 but had to pause while the studio took on survival work.
Now, it seems, Unsung Story is going into development again. "I want to explicitly state that this project is not dead," Scott wrote.
"We are currently going screen by screen through the entire game to create the project plan for the remaining tasks, and I'll publish that here to Kickstarter. After that we will be building out and publishing a new sprint / milestone plan with development target dates."
Based on the early access feedback, Little Orbit has redesigned Unsung Story's main character, replaced 3D model "bobble heads" during dialogue sequences with more traditional 2D portraits, cut down on excess dialogue, redesigned the UI, rebalanced the class system and added female character models absent in the original release.
I don't want to jinx it, but it does seem like Unsung Story might truly be finished someday. In the meantime, you could do worse than playing and replaying the latest iteration of Yasumi Matsuno's masterpiece Tactics Ogre, Reborn, which he oversaw.
