Sadness & Solitude

Overview

Sadness & Solitude is a 2D horror-RPG developed by HullBreach Studios and SinnDevelopment for Wii U and Xbox One. Inspired by the canceled Wii title Sadness, the game is presented entirely in black and white. The main gameplay perspective is a two-dimensional sidescrolling view but there are also third person areas with the gameplay camera positioned behind the player character. Mechanically, Sadness & Solitude takes inspiration from the NES game Friday the 13th.

Story

In Solitude & Sadness, players take on the role of a human test subject trapped inside a government facility named PANGEA in the 1950s. The story will primarily be told through environmental scenery and the character's nightmares. There will be no dialogue interaction between characters.

Development

Originally announced as a reboot of the canceled Wii game Sadness, the developers had to distance themselves from that IP after it became clear that the rights situation wasn't entirely taken care of. Sadness & Solitude is now its own separate thing.

In May 2014, HullBreach Studios and Cthulhi Games announced a revival of the Sadness concept for Wii U now as a 2D game.

Besides the change from a 3D survival horror game to a 2D RPG, little is known about the current form of the game. In an interview with Nintendo Life, Cthulhi's Jeremy Kleve said:

Without a doubt, the original concept is a huge inspiration to us. We will be sticking to the original idea pretty closely, but don't be surprised if there are some changes here and there in terms of characters, mechanics, and setting. [...]

Since this is our own realization of the game, it would not feel right if we did not start from scratch. Besides, we are introducing new elements that were never intended in the original brief, including RPG and puzzle-based mechanics.

A day after the announcement of HullBreach and Cthulhi's revival, a follow-up statement was issued to Eurogamer that they were actually not in possession of the rights to the Sadness IP.

"We very recently have contacted the old developers to obtain rights to the what little IP actually existed and their blessing," Cthuli's Jeremy Kleve wrote. "Should they work against us we are prepared to change the title of the game and drop any usage of their IP, this however will not slow us down in the least since most of their ideas were just ideas.

"Sadness had us intrigued since it began years ago, and we decided recently that we didn't want to let it die off completely. We would have acted sooner if we were capable back then, but as you know the consoles weren't as open to indies as they are now."

"The Sadness IP is in the hands of a consortium with 4 studios currently fighting for the bid, and that while we at HullBreach and Cthulhi would like to make a competing bid and secure rights to Sadness, unfortunately we cannot at this time. Sorry to fans for any inconvenience."

Ultimately, the project was renamed to Sadness & Solitude and in August 2014 it was announced that SinnDevelopment got involved in the project to take care of programming duties with Cthuli Games dropping out. HullBreach is working on the Wii U version while SinnDevelopment is handling the Xbox One version of the game but both are closely working together. Sadness & Solitude is being developed using the Unity Engine.