Entirely too often, Kickstarter campaigns are funded only to have their creators vanish into thin air. While this might make some backers claim “scam”, most of the time, it’s just unprepared developers being hit with the reality of game development. Making a game is crazy hard, and very few Kickstarter campaigns take that into account.

Unforgotten Quest is a side-scrolling co-op RPG with… Wait, let me get this just right… “Loot, Levels, Skills, Classes, Quests, Bosses, Humor, Multiplayer, and most importantly, Time eater!” While those keywords in that particular order might not actually make sense, the project they’re attached to looked promising when it was successfully funded in December of 2012. Robert Moran and team managed to raise $118,824 for their dream project despite having no artists on-board, bringing in the backers with interesting gameplay mechanics and a solid roadmap of the game’s development.

The first backer-only update came in April 4th, followed by a May 5th update directing fans and backers to the developers’ other websites. After that, over two solid years of silence. Two years. Not a single post to Kickstarter.

Now, without going into how unprofessional and shameful it is to leave backers in the dark for two years, this would usually be enough to make any reasonable backer pack up their interest and leave. Luckily, this story has a happy ending. Defying every expectation in the world, the developers of Unforgotten Quest have started updating again, for better or worse. Before we go into the actual content of the update, I want to take a second to give the devs kudos for coming back to the project.

When it comes to the actual update, I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly where the last two years went. The first paragraph introduces Kay, a new artist that’s been working on the project since the beginning of 2016. Kay was responsible for the artwork in URealms Live, which seems to be a fairly extensive, tangentially-related YouTube series where the game’s devs play a “URealms” flavored version of Dungeons & Dragons via Tabletop Simulator.

Whether or not they’re playing an original creation looks pretty irrelevant, because the game backers paid for isn’t a D&D clone – it’s a side-scrolling co-op RPG, and that game does not exist. A couple paragraphs down, we see the developers more or less admit that they have made very little progress over the last two years. It looks like they decided on an engine (Unity) and they’ve got a few in-game assets (which aren’t final, because this update was posted before the team’s artists started work on the project).

I highly encourage you to go take a look at the update page yourself and draw your own conclusions, because while this is the first time I’ve seen this project, I am floored by how little the developers have managed to accomplish. I think that Unforgotten Quest could be a great game, and I’m very interested in playing a well-made co-op side scrolling action RPG with Time eater. Unfortunately, it looks like the devs are more interested in making cartoons and Let’s Plays than finishing the game they were paid over $100,000 to complete.

Keep an eye on this project! If the devs manage to get their tish together and start actually making this game, it could be something really worthwhile. Unfortunately, after two full years and $118,824, the developers have three gifs, a screenshot, a page of concept art, and a terrible cartoon spin-off to show us. (As well as dozens of hours of the devs playing Tabletop Simulator on YouTube instead of working on the game). The final paragraph of this update, posted on December 23rd, promises an imminent video update which has, so far, not been posted to Kickstarter.