Hideo Kojima.original

The utterly bizarre speculation surrounding upcoming PlayStation 5 exclusive Abandoned and its tenuous links to game creator Hideo Kojima simply aren't going away. After initially denying claims Blue Box Game Studios is simply Kojima in disguise and apologising for a recent tweet linking Abandoned to Silent Hill, fans of the Metal Gear Solid designer are now drawing up long lists of evidence linking him to the PS5 project in question. We suggest you buckle up for this one because we're about to go down the rabbit hole and then some.

This Reddit post collects all of the "proof" under one roof, so we'll be working from that. The list begins with a few random and potentially unrelated occurrences, including the fact Blue Box Game Studios' YouTube page features hills (Silent Hill and potentially Death Stranding references) and one recent tweet from Kojima himself including "silent" and "hill". Fans have also noticed the letters P and T are covered by trees in the Abandoned PS5 teaser trailer. What's the relevance? The famous P.T. demo, of course. The first section of claims is then rounded out by general chatter of how Hideo Kojima has done this once before. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was originally announced by Moby Dick Studio before it was revealed to be Kojima behind the entire thing.

But here's where things get really unusual. In the past couple of days, fans have been really digging into the backstory of Blue Box Game Studios and the people behind it, uncovering some strange links and odd happenings in the process. The original teasers for P.T. made mention of "Snowflakes of Blood". A tweet from two days ago mentions that same phrase as a "gameplay fact" for Abandoned alongside the usual console specs. Next up, the developer was founded roughly one year after P.T. launched on PlayStation 4 and between then and now, it has only made one other game. The logo for that title is a black handprint, a lot like you would see in Death Stranding. Along the way, one of Blue Box Game Studios' cancelled games was named Lost Tapes — also the name of the fourth soundtrack for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

The head of Blue Box Game Studios, Hasan Kahraman, has played a game on his PSN account named Demon Blood, which isn't available on the PS Store. This simply could be a code name for Abandoned, but investigators have picked up on the icon associated with it. It displays the text: "Siren Head". This is being used as another link to Silent Hill due to the famous enemy Pyramid Head. One other interesting suggestion is that the developer's Twitter account posts in the very early hours of the morning in its local time of the Netherlands. Fans have picked up on this, and since Japan is seven hours ahead of the country, have now linked this to Kojima firing off some tweets in the late morning in the east.

Fast forward to today and Geoff Keighley answers a question about the Abandoned studio, revealing Blue Box Game Studios asked him if he could help them reveal the game. He says "there will be more to share on this title", but that Hasan Kahraman actually privately messaged him about it a "little while ago". Keighley then shared evidence of this Twitter DM, but due to the way the social media site documents those messages, Keighley had either screenshotted it immediately after receiving it or had only just had it appear in his Twitter inbox. It begs the question: if it's the former, why would you screenshot DMs from a random developer you'd probably never heard of?

And that's where we're at at the time of writing. Our next update could arrive on Sunday when the "Abandoned Realtime Trailers app" arrives on the PS Store. This will supposedly allow you to experience "gameplay reveals in realtime on your PS5". Even this raises some questions since such a thing hasn't been done on PS5 before, so why would an unknown indie developer be the first one to do so?

Anyway, after all that, where do you stand on this bizarre situation? Do you believe Hideo Kojima really is behind all of it or is this simply a small indie studio desperate for some attention and is buying into anything it can do to get eyes on Abandoned? Have your say in the comments below.

[source reddit.com]