Recoil Games struggles to fund ‘Rochard’ sequel

Recently, Recoil Games posted a rather spiffy video showing off some pre-production gameplay for the Rochard: Part 2, the possible sequel to last year’s sleeper gem Rochard.

Shortly after the original title dropped on the Playstation Network (following last year’s PSN Play promotion) the team at Recoil began work on Rochard’s next interstellar adventure. Sadly, a series of financial drawbacks put the brakes on the game’s development. As stated by Recoil, their woes began when the PSN Store got hacked, soon after that Rochard’s release date was postponed until late September; making layoffs inevitable. Luckily a small group went on to polish up and port the title further for its Steam and Mac App Store releases.

Recoil went on to state “When the game finally became available on the PSN Store on September 27th 2011, there was not enough buzz for it to sell despite it being IGN Editors’ Choice and getting other great awards. We had no funds to do any marketing ourselves, so there was no choice but to rush the PC version to Steam despite the bad market timing.”

As of now production on Rochard’s sequel is at a standstill while the company attempts to obtain some additional funding. They’ve also stated plans to release some DLC at some point (of which I will gladly buy). Recoil was able to slightly alleviate some of their financial difficulties by releasing their gravity defying puzzle-platformer both in the last Humble Bundle (Humble Indie Bundle 6) and in a physical boxed format. Hopefully things will begin looking shape up for these guys, as they set their sights towards Kickstarter and Indiegogo for funding, and with any luck we’ll all get to join Rochard and his kooky gang on another adventure.

If you haven’t checked out the first title and own a PlayStation 3 or a computer capable of running Rochard I strongly recommend it. The gameplay is fast and fluid, the mechanics are far more than solid, the dialogue is witty, and above all: its one of the most fun titles I’d played last year (and still one of the best physics based puzzle-platformers I’ve played thus far).

You can find out more info and read Recoil’s devblog over at rochardthegame.com. And as always keep your sights set on IGM as we’ll surely keep track of this title’s progress.