Oh, this makes for painful reading. Spanish developers Tequila Works canceled the game and made a “small” number of layoffs amid financial difficulties.
“It is with deep regret that we must inform you of the decision to cancel the unannounced match,” we read in Tequila’s post on the website LinkedIn. “This tough decision means that we will restructure the studio to focus on developing just one game. These changes will impact a miniature number of roles within the studio.
“This is an extremely difficult time and our aim is to provide support and guidance to those affected by this situation,” it continued.
Tequila remains best known for Rime, a first-class graduate of the Ico-meets-Zelda school where adolescent children explore emotional fantasy worlds that are probably metaphors for something, but they are also the co-creators and publishers of The Sexy Brutale, one of my favorite side-scrolling puzzle games time. Their last game was the League Of Legends spin-off, Song Of Nunu. Katharine (RPS in the room) called it “a thrilling, endearing platformer that doesn’t require any knowledge of League Of Legends to enjoy.” They had previously created Gylt, which Alice B (RPS in peace) became enchanted with, calling it Alan Wake for kids and providing a nice introduction to the nuances of commercial game design in general. Here’s a longer fragment:
If you want your child to learn that yellow things can be pushed or climbed on in games, that enemies often have glowing, sensitive spots, that you can go back to previously closed areas to find things, that in grid search games you need to find three MacGuffins that it often pays to run past enemies to get to the next area, and that witnessing abuse if you’re not participating in it yourself is still really bad, then Gylt will do it all in one.
Suffice it to say that Tequila Works are good people with a lot of strings attached. I hope everything will settle down from here. Good luck to those who have lost their jobs.
