It’s rare to get a peek at unfinished games, especially ones that aren’t going to be released any time soon. The indie developer behind A Short Hike decided it might be interesting to give people an idea of what that looks like through a demo of a Paper Mario-inspired game they consider to be on indefinite hold.
Untitled Paper RPG is the game Adam Gryu was working on before releasing his popular cozy hiking game. It started after Nintendo announced Paper Mario Color Splash in 2016, which drove Gryu to make a game inspired by the old Paper Mario RPGs. In 2018, however, he put the RPG on the back burner and devoted his time to developing A Short Hike. And then A Short Hike blew up.
“After releasing A Short Hike and working on the subsequent updates and ports… I didn’t really want to go back to this game?” Gryu wrote in a post on Itch.io. “The development for the RPG had become difficult, which was why I took a break from it in the first place. I might return to this project someday, but I’ve been working on other things and don’t see myself making time for this RPG in [the] near future.”
Although he only considers the Untitled Paper RPG “sort of” cancelled, he wrote a list of reasons why working on it was “overwhelming.” Gryu said it had too big of a scope, lacked a compelling story, and its turn-based combat wasn’t all that fun. “In general, I started to lose the joy that I felt working on it,” he said.
The free demo on Itch.io, which features art and characters by a few other developers, has only about one to two hours of gameplay, and stuff that Gryu says he’s proud of and stuff that is embarrassing. “I figured sharing the demo is better than nothing,” he wrote.
Gryu says he’s still making games, but isn’t sure which of his many projects he’ll finish next. For now, he’s going to keep up with the annual updates to his pumpkin carving MMO Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival and continue to work on new games until something sticks.