Rebirth or final nail in the coffin? The unfinished Spectacle finally sees the light of day – Spectacle: Worlds Unseen

Every week, if not every day, games get lost. We’re not talking about live service games dying along with their servers (that’s a whole other story), or mobile games no longer working because of firmware updates for Android and iOS. No, a large proportion of lost games never even get into the hands of players. Either because the developers can’t find a publisher, because they run out of money, or because they simply lose faith in the project.

If you’re lucky, an unfinished version of a lost game may eventually be found on an old hard drive or uploaded to one of the many corners of the Internet. A good example is Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, a canceled point-and-click adventure game from the mid-1990s that suddenly appeared in a playable and nearly completed version in 2016. All too often, the best you can hope for from unfinished projects is nothing more than a few screenshots and, if you’re really lucky, some grainy clips. Fortunately, there are exceptions.

Last month, Copenhagen-based Half Past Yellow Spectacle: Worlds Unseen released for free on Steam. The title has a double meaning. First, the game is about manipulating your vision to see new paths through puzzle-filled rooms. At the same time, the release quite literally represents some game worlds that have actually been lost.

As the developer previously revealed to Gamereactor, Spectacle was indefinitely postponed a year ago because they could not find a developer who could truly see the commercial potential of the project. All the hard work was not lost, however. Much of the design and crazy universe lives on in their newest game, Tempest Tower.

But this was not enough for Half Past Yellow, which opted to release the unfinished game on Steam in June. “We saw no reason why the game should just sit and rot away on a dusty hard drive. We have made many small games, jam games and prototypes that will never see the light of day. But Spectacle was different. We already had a Steam page and a working vertical part of the game, which we had sent to several publishers. The cost to publish it was very low, so there was no point in not doing it.” says Max Wrigthon, co-founder of Half Past Yellow.

In 2024, we tried Spectacle for Nordic Game and chose to highlight it as one of the highlights of the conference. However, Spectacle: Unseen Worlds contains much more than what was available in the demo at the time, Wrigthon explained.

“The demo version of Spectacle had a slightly different training area, so there are changes there, but the biggest difference is that there’s just ‘more game.’ Spectacle was meant to consist of a training area plus four worlds. Worlds Unseen includes the training area plus 90% of the other world. We had actually built much of the first world (40%), but some key scenes that were supposed to set everything up were missing, and it would have taken too much time to fix it for a free launch.”

Playing an unfinished game, however, is not necessarily something you notice. Spectacle takes place in a crazy, somewhat disjointed dimension where levels float in a pink void. In other words, the game’s aesthetic already has a somewhat chaotic feel that hides its rough edges and unfinished elements. And fortunately, the most important part of the game, the fun puzzles, is finished and thoroughly tested.

In the training section of Spectacle, you learn the importance of looking at things from different angles and with fresh eyes. Blinking your right and left eyes freezes so-called quantum objects in different ways, allowing you to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. You can also briefly squeeze both eyes (by pressing both mouse buttons simultaneously), which can activate floating eyes that open doors and raise platforms. Things get really fun when you gain access to goggles that allow you to see hidden messages or change the camera perspective.

The new space in Worlds Unseen introduces new goggles, among other things, but also offers more room for and builds on existing mechanics. In an early puzzle, for example, you have to “connect” to the eye of a statue and control your own character in the third person, while alternately turning the “eye contacts” on and off. The multiple perspectives take some getting used to, but once you understand how to switch between them, it becomes clear that the developer has created some really well-designed puzzles.

Spectacle: Worlds Unseen is a bittersweet experience. The gameplay is solid and the fun universe continues to charm. But even though the game is probably three or four times longer than the demo, you still feel like it was over in a flash. It’s nice not to be left empty-handed. But it could have been so much more.

Did the launch of Worlds Unseen raise a little hope that Half Past Yellow will one day complete the project? Well, Wrigthon is standing by with a fire extinguisher. Unseen Worlds is a farewell salute; a dignified burial of the project, rather than a rebirth.

“When we officially dropped Spectacle, we were 99% sure we weren’t going to return to the project. It was pretty clear we couldn’t get the publisher interest we had hoped for, and we were already developing Tempest Tower because it was a more suitable game for us to self-publish. I think this launch takes away the last 1% chance that we would return to Spectacle. It was nice to see players engage with the game and provide feedback, but the door is now completely closed.”

The next big milestone for Half Past Yellow is the 1.0 release of the unique tower defense game Tempest Tower, which will be released in Early Access on August 19. This summer will see not one, but two points for the trippy, fragmented and charming universe the developers launched with Spectacle. And then it’s time to move on.

“Regarding other projects set in this world, we will never say never. But we will not revisit the world of Spectacle and Tempest Towers in our next project.” concludes Wrigthon.