author: Miriam Moszczynska
Abandoned Early Access Game The Stomping Land Revives After 8 Years
After an 8-year absence, the developer of The Stomping Land has returned. The game has been receiving updates since then, but it still hasn't returned for sale on Steam.
In the world of video games, 8 years is almost like an eternity. The developer going by the handle "Jig" has just decided to return to Steam after such a period of complete silence. In the discussion tab of his seemingly forgotten game, The Stomping Land, he informed about resuming work on the game.
There is no store tab, but you can play
This January, the developer returned to the dedicated forum of The Stomping Land on Steam. In addition to announcing that the game has no official social media, he also posted the following message.
"Experimental build
I'm starting a separate experimental branch of The Stomping Land, which will essentially rebuild the game from the ground up using modern methods. Daily testing for this part of the game will be available as if you were a tester, so feel free to join at any time using the separate launcher. The store will not reopen, so this is for current players only," he wrote Jig.
Did it get the gamers excited? Of course, especially since users who own the game can return to The Stomping Land. Is it worth getting our hopes up? That's a debatable.
Bearing in mind how Jig treated the game when it was made available as early access, it will be better to approach this year's announcement with a lot of caution - especially since the game still doesn't have a tab on Steam.
Seemingly regular updates, but not really
Since the announcement of the start of work on a new version of the game, Jig has been updating us, more or less, every week about changes introduced to the game.
The latest update may be of particular interest to players following the fortunes of this virtually forgotten game. In a post published on April 14, Jig informs that the game engine has been updated to Unreal Engine 5.
It is worth mentioning that 8 years ago the work was stopped specifically because of the engine. At that time Jig claimed that the lack of updates for The Stomping Land was due to the title being moved to UE4.
The mysterious disappearance of The Stomping Land
The title was present in the news 8 years ago, when this promising multiplayer survival game launched in early access on Steam. Later, however, the game's situation began to fall apart, and its creator - Alex "Jig" Fundora - completely disappeared from the Internet.
Even his collaborators were unable to contact him (one of them left for another studio), and the fate of the rest is unknown.
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When Jig went off the radar, several thousand players requested that they be refunded a total of $114,000 that was raised on Kickstarter. The website couldn't do much and only blocked the creator's account. Besides, the game vanioshed from Early Access as quickly as it launched, and left Steam's store altogether.
The Stomping Land was forgotten for a good few years, until this January, when Jig magically returned with an announcement. However, let's keep our fingers crossed that the story of this interestingly promising survival game doesn't repeat.
