Only Up!, the platformer that took Twitch by storm by challenging players with its severe difficulty, was taken off sale on Steam in the interest of healing the developer’s mental wellbeing.
Developer SCKR Games explained, in an announcement about a number of small updates to Only Up!, that this was their first ever game and it was a learning experience for them.
“The game has kept me under a lot of stress all these months,” they admitted. “What I need now is peace of mind and healing. I plan to take a pause, and continue my education in game design and further with new experience and knowledge to direct my energies to my next game.”
SCKR Games shared that their next project is titled “Kith” and will be worked on with a small team if all goes according to plan. Though the genre is not known, they said that it is totally different to Only Up! and will feature a focus on “cinematography”.
Fans have been supportive of their decision to step down and posted praise for their efforts even as a relatively inexperienced developer.
However, SCKR Games had been criticised earlier this year for a scattering of copyright violations, including sound effects from Final Fantasy 7 and Minecraft. As a result, the game was pulled from Steam and then relaunched without that material.
Additionally, the game’s perceived promotion of non-fungible tokens was also a point of criticism. Images from the Goblintown NFT series appeared in Only Up!‘s locations as the player climbs the tower, and the title was argued to be a riff on “Up Only”, a frequently used phrase in cryptocurrency communities.
In other gaming news, RuneScape‘s Hero Pass will undergo a huge re-design following the poor fan feedback on its pay-to-win parts and loss of popular Daily Challenges.