It’s been more than a year and a half since I first stepped into Budget Cuts, an instantly promising VR title from indie developer Neat Corporation with a novel and efficient locomotion system that blends perfectly with the game’s throwing-knife stealth action gameplay. Though the studio has been largely silent since then, they’ve assured me that the game is being actively developed (“like, a lot”) and headed toward an early 2018 launch.
Update (03/06/18): Neat Corp co-founder Joachim Holmér recently tweeted that new ‘Budget Cuts’ content will be featured at GDC 2018. Holmér will also be giving a dev talk on the game’s portal locomotion.
Original article (9/27/17): If you’ve never played the free Budget Cuts demo, you have no excuse not to fire up your headset and give it a go. I haven’t heard of a single person who has played the demo and come out of it not genuinely impressed and ready for more.
Sadly, the taste of the demo is the last we’ve seen basically since it launched more than a year ago, with the studio offering no new updates into the state of the game’s development, not even so much as a screenshot.
After hearing recently from a few folks in the VR community who were wondering whether the game was still in the works, I reached out to get a pulse on Neat Corporation and make sure the development team hadn’t got lost in VR somewhere along the way. Much to my relief, the studio says they’ve been head down, hard at work on Budget Cuts, and confirmed the game is on track for an early 2018 release.
“We’re spending minimal time on PR in order to focus on development of the game, seeing as we are such a small team. This understandably leads to people wondering about the status. Just rest assured, we are working on the game, like, a lot,” Neat Corporation developer Marko Permanto told me.
Let’s all breathe a collective sigh of relief in 3… 2… 1…
And now we resume the dreadful wait.