The Developers Behind 2023’s Most Notorious Game Just Can’t Stop Themselves

You know what’s always fun? Watching grifters flail. That aside, there’s news about the clown-car developers of The Day Before, that hilariously terrible bait-n-switch 2023 game that went from Steam’s most wishlisted to most hated, over the course of an increasingly ridiculous series of delays, and the eventual release of a game that barely resembled what had been promised. Then, like a bedraggled phoenix, crawling and wheezing from the ashes, this year developers Fntastic returned with news of a new game, and with quite some brass, a new Kickstarter to fund it. Guess what?! Forget about that game too, they’ve got another new one!

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Suggested ReadingThe failure of the Kickstarter for the Russian team’s new project—some sort of Fall Guys-but-made-from-assets knock-off called Escape Factory—was pleasingly inevitable. At one point, someone very amusingly offered around $10,000 to the $20,000 goal, suggesting the money could go to the people who went unpaid when working on The Day Before, before Fntastic got the hint that it might not be a real donation and rejected it. With the crowdfunding campaign never managing to climb above $3,146 from 50 backers, Fntastic cancelled the Kickstarter entirely earlier today, October 23.

Naturally, there were never any updates to the campaign, not even on cancellation, and true to form, Fntastic has deleted all its previous social media posts about the project because that makes it go away forever. (Sadly for them, Kickstarter doesn’t let you do that.) Its X account was yet again completely wiped, with the amusing note that, “We’ve decided to move all of our activities to Discord, where we can engage more closely with the community.” Or indeed, be able to remove people who keep pointing out their past.

All mention of Escape Factory, and the associated promises to change and improve, are now removed, although the game’s page remains on Steam, along with a demo to download. (There are no public servers, and if you should try to create your own private one, you’re going to need three other people you really hate if you want to play. It refuses to launch with fewer than four people, and given the demo peaked at a total of seven players in the last 24 hours, your chances aren’t great.)

However, as of a few hours ago, the company’s X account has sprung back into life! Because, like a self-loathing therapist, they cannot help themselves. Fntastic has announced a new game! It’s called Items, and appears to be some sort of follow-up to a game the team did have some success with, 2021’s Propnight. (Claiming sales of 900,000 copies, it makes it peculiar that the game has now been completely deleted from Steam.)

Image: Fntastic / Kotaku

Want to know more?! Well, tough, because the game’s site is a placeholder, and the only evidence that the game exists at all is a picture of two t-posed rendered models, and most hilariously of all, a “Press Kit” that links to a download of nothing other than the game’s logo, which appears to be the word “ITEMS” in something close to the Fortnite font.

A page-long letter posted to the refreshed X account declares that “we have decided that our Escape Factory project has not generated enough interest,” and so they’ve concluded that the Kickstarter is unlikely to succeed. No shit. So that game is “temporarily suspend[ed],” but they’re straight onto the next grif project.

…Your wishes are very important to us, and we are happy to announce the start of development on a new action-horror prop hunt game called ITEMS!

This is exactly what many of you have been waiting for! Once we have a fully playable demo, we may launch a new Kickstarter campaign or explore other options for release. It’s important to us that our players get the chance to play and test the game in advance.

Please do another Kickstarter please do another Kickstarter please do another Kickstarter please do another Kickstarter please do another Kickstarter…

Image: Fntastic / Kotaku

But that’s not all! Another means of funding ITEMS is to also make mobile games at the same time, “to support the process.” Yup. Yuuuuup.

In the few hours since the announcement, a few others have offered some calm and reasoned responses to the news. “Are you fucking mad?” asked VikingNilsen. “If any people give these guys money, then they live in the same universe as unicorns.”

“You must be the most delusional group of developers in history,” offered ItsMeNomad.

“100% delusional speedrun,” added ThatHartleyKat.

We will, of course, keep you up-to-date on this ongoing story.

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