‘Fez II’ Canceled, Developer Phil Fish Confirms

When Polytron announced around the end of E3 that Fez II was in development, it took many by surprise. The game was to be the sequel to the critically acclaimed, oft-delayed indie title from the mind of developer Phil Fish – and it was a sequel that no one expected to hear of so soon.

Unfortunately, there have been some surprising new developments about Fez II, but not of the good sort; the game was officially canceled by Fish over the weekend.

Seemingly out of nowhere at the time, the official Polytron Twitter account tweeted that Fez II, which was announced only a little over a month ago, has officially been canceled and all development halted. The tweet ended with an apology “for the disappointment.”

So why, exactly, was the game canceled in such a short amount of time after its announcement? It’s complicated, apparently.

In a statement posted on the developer’s website, Fish wrote a short statement on the game’s cancellation, and gave some insight into why he was doing it. Here’s the statement, presented unedited:

“Fez II is cancelled. i am done. i take the money and i run. this is as much as i can stomach. this is isn’t the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign. you win.”

The last bit of the statement, in which Fish denies that the game’s cancellation didn’t result from “any one thing,” is likely in response to speculation that Marcus “Annoyed Gamer” Beer’s recent lashing out at the developer on GameTrailers’ “Invisible Walls” segment had something to do with it.

It didn’t help that Fish was adding fuel to the speculation; Fish and Beer got into a heated discussion on Twitter prior to the game’s cancellation. Fish has since made his account private, but Destructoid managed to capture a few screenshots of some of the nastier tweets for their report.

IGN reports that, in tweets following the flood of speculation, Fish claimed that Fez II being canceled was not about the heated argument. Rather, the developer claimed that he simply wants to make a move out of the gaming industry to avoid any more “abuse.”

No matter the reason, the news is sure to disappoint fans of the original.