I got in touch with Felipe Modesto, Fira Soft’s creative director, who was kind enough to give me an update on the status of his team’s winter themed survival horror adventure, Kriophobia. When the games’ Kickstarter campaign failed to meet its $50k CAD funding goal in January, most of the team left for Carnival in Brazil. Even Mr. Modesto did not return to the office till last Friday. Though their campaign did not succeed, the overall tone that I got from the creative director was fairly positive. When asked what the next steps for the project were, Modesto responded with:

Yes, Kickstarter did not meet its goal, but that’s ok. We launched the campaign in December and knew that this would be a challenge. It was our first campaign and one of our goals was to increase awareness of the project. While the funding goal was not achieved, we got an enormous amount of feedback. This lead us back to the drawing board. We’ve reassigned part of our team to a couple of projects we had running to get them out of the door as soon as possible. We’re doing this to increase our capital, as we’ve been funding Kriophobia with our resources and don’t want to resort to bank loans until we absolutely must. Lastly, we’ve been contacted by publishers and have started talking with them to see if working together would be good for the game.

When I asked next what progress the game has made since then, he replied:

For the past month we have gone over the project, analyzing all comments on our Kickstarter page, emails we have gotten, all videos people posted. We’ve written many reports, discussed the relevance of the input we got and even made a few closed tests to evaluate possible changes.

In discussing a final release date, Modesto went on to say that due to the campaign’s failure, the official launch has been postponed. He stressed that nothing was final yet, but that it was Fira Soft’s hope to release the first chapter of Kriophobia sometime this year. Though the game was not successful on Kickstarter, it had reached over half of its funding goal of $50k CAD, and during the holiday season no less, proving that perhaps the survival horror genre is not quite dead yet.