The solo developer of horror hit The Mortuary Assistant has told Eurogamer that his officially licensed Paranormal Activity game, Paranormal Activity: Threshold, “is technically done for good”.
Earlier this month, Brian Clarke revealed development on Paranormal Activity: Threshold had ceased because he’d needed more time to make it. A quirk of the impending Warner Bros. acquisition by Paramount Skydance meant Clarke had needed to ask Paramount for an extension rather than Warner Bros. And Paramount declined.
Clarke, faced with the decision of rushing out a game he ultimately wouldn’t be happy with, or parting ways with Paramount, chose the latter.
In a follow-up email exchange, Clarke has now told Eurogamer: “I can’t confidently say the Paramount merger influenced the decision. I think, ultimately, they wanted a game to release in Q4 of 2026 and I was asking for more time which made that not possible. If that was due to some new management or something else as a result of the merger, I can’t say.
“The game is technically done for good. I have ideas of how to make what I have work as something new but I don’t want to promise anything and get myself into a situation where something is expected. There is also a lot of work to sort of decouple what I had designed to be a Paranormal Activity game from other design aspects and make something new. That’s a lot of work for a project I’m uncertain about currently and still have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth about.”
“It’s honestly difficult to imagine a path forward with it while it’s still so new,” he wrote. “There’s a lot I’d have to do to make it something I’d be motivated to work on for another year.”
Given that, Clarke’s preference seems to be for exploring smaller projects for now, “since I’ve become so burnt out on the concept of throwing myself into something for the next two years”, he said. “I have plenty of new ideas that interest me.”
Paranormal Activity: Threshold was announced in 2024 and was teased with a found-footage style trailer that made it look a bit like a single-player Phasmophobia game, as players carry camcorders and other gadgets around in order to track and isolate paranormal activity. The game was reportedly demoed at PAX East in the US earlier this year, with previews describing a 30-minute chunk that increased in tension and supernatural activity as it progressed. In theory, it doesn’t sound dissimilar to The Mortuary Assistant.
The Mortuary Assistant was released in 2022 and found success on PC before spreading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and Switch. The game places you in the position of an assistant working in a mortuary and has you carry out the tasks involved in preparing a body for burial or cremation, such as wiring mouths shut and pumping embalming fluid through them, all in gruesome 3D detail.
However, that’s not all that’s going on. At the same time, the mortuary you’re working on is being haunted, by a demonic spirit that will possess one of the bodies in your building and bring doom and gloom if you don’t identify the corpse in question and cremate it first. But you only get a few guesses, so there’s a bit of restarting and trying again. However, as the game shuffles the next time you play, you can’t brute force the answer.
It’s a good game – even I’ve played it – and something I particularly appreciate is the horrors it throws at you. The scares are there to be witnessed rather than run away from. It’s more of a walking simulator in that regard, or spooky point-and-click, which I very much like.
