For the past two years, Brian Clarke had been working on a high-stakes follow-up to his 2022 breakout horror hit The Mortuary Assistant. The DarkStone Digital founder had been tapped by Paramount to create a Paranormal Activity game, a task that he immediately went all-in on. As the 2026 deadline approached, Clarke knew that the project would need just a little more time to do the series justice. He asked Paramount for a short extension — and the answer was a firm no. In May, all that work came to an abrupt halt when DarkStone Digital and publisher DreadXP announced that they were canceling the project.
Now five months later, the development horror story has one final twist. Clarke is releasing the game once known as Paranormal Activity: Threshold, or at least the prototype of it. Today, you can play Playable Archive for free, a reworked version of the cancelled game’s PAX East demo that removes all references to Paranormal Activity. As Clarke explained in a video interview with Polygon ahead of today’s release, it’s a rare preservation win in an industry where so many ill-fated projects are sent to the wood chipper.
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Paranormal Activity: Threshold started as a simple pitch. In 2024, the head of DreadXP reached out to Clarke and asked if he’d be interested in pitching a Paranormal Activity game to Paramount. As a fan of the series, and an indie developer looking for his next big project after The Mortuary Assistant, Clarke said yes. His idea was to make a game about a detective sorting through the kind of video we see in the found footage films (the eighth of which is due out next year). Paramount liked the idea, so Clarke dropped everything to focus on it.
Dezvoltare seemed to be going well. Earlier this year, Clarke brought a demo of the game to PAX East, which was received positively by players. Clarke told me that it even received a writing award at the show. But while everything was progressing well, there was still a lot of work to do ahead of a planned launch in late 2026. Polish, porting, localization, and more work was needed to get the game in a shape that Clarke felt comfortable with. When he went to Paramount to ask for a short delay to February 2027, he figured it wouldn’t be much of a big deal. It was.
“Their response was just no,” Clarke told Polygon. “I think they ultimately wanted something for Q4. And I was not going to be able to deliver that in the way they wanted — I guess the way I wanted… I have a choice here of basically: I’m gonna try to throw this game out as quickly as possible and hope it’s decent or it’s basically done.”
Part of Paramount’s inflexibility may have been tied to some big changes happening behind the scenes. In 2024, Paramount Global and Skydance Media announced their intention to merge in a blockbuster deal valued at $8 billion. While Clarke noted that his relationship with his direct contacts at Paramount didn’t change much over two years, he did notice a difference in communication behavior over time.
“There were certainly slowdowns on turnaround for certain things at points,” Clarke said. “I put something in and, you know, things had to be cleared before I could move forward on something. As part of the development process, that was not normal for me. It was like, ‘You’ve gotta get it cleared through the red tape.’ And that process would take longer because I think there was some stuff going on there that was kind of mixing things up, right? It was really reminiscent of my time at Disney or at Mythic when I was working on Warhammer. You’ve gotta get approval, approval, approval, approval.”
With a hard no on the table, Clarke was faced with a choice: rush out a compromised version of the game, or cancel it outright. Some developers might have chosen the former, especially considering the fact that the game was far along, all things considered, but Clarke was faced with a uniquely difficult decision as an indie developer with a reputation to protect.
“The way I looked at it was: If a bad game goes out under a large title, under a large company, it kinda is just another tick for them. They’re like, ‘Oh, well, that didn’t work!'” Clarke said. “For me as a solo developer, who the last game I put out did well, my goal is to keep that train going, and it hurts me a lot more basically, right?”
With the full support of DreadXP, Clarke went back to Paramount and told the team that he was going to need to walk away from the project. Paramount didn’t try to push back: “They were just like ‘Okay,'” Clarke said. The lack of discussion came as a bit of a surprise considering how much time and resources had been put into the project, but it was ultimately a small game that Clarke doesn’t believe was much of a financial loss for Paramount. (Clarke declined to share the budget, but implied it was well under a million dollars.)
While Clarke was sure he had made the right decision, he was left in an unfortunate position. Now four years after The Mortuary Assistant, he had no follow-up in hand to capitalize on that game’s momentum. Anxious that it would look like he had done nothing for four years, the team at DreadXP floated the idea of simply releasing what they had anyways. Thanks to a flexible deal with Paramount, Clarke was able to keep everything he built and was given confirmation that he could release it so long as he took Paranormal Activity out of it.
The result of that is Playable Archive. The title is a cheeky nod to P.T., the demo for Hideo Kojima’s canceled Silent Hills project that was released on PlayStation 4 in 2014 and then infamously delisted in 2015. It’s not a full game so much as a finished version of the Pax East demo with all of the Paranormal Activity references scrubbed from it. It’s only about 30 minutes long, but it’s free and gives players a rare glimpse into a project that wasn’t going to see the light of day anyway.
“It is important to me in a way to be like, this is what I was doing,” Clarke said. “Here it is, and you can see and draw whatever conclusions you want. You can be bummed about it, happy about it, whatever, right? Because I’ve had my grieving process with it, and so this is now kind of like putting it out there and being like, all right, moving to the next thing.”
Throughout the conversation, Clarke kept coming back to the idea that he just didn’t want it to look like he had nothing to show four years after The Mortuary Assistant. In reality, he was extraordinarily busy. He had a stint working as a co-director at DreadXP, consulting on a film adaptation of The Mortuary Assistant (which had a limited run this past February), and briefly working on a project based on Creepshow all while making Paranormal Activity: Threshold. So why all the worry?
It’s an understandable anxiety given that momentum can be crucial for indie developers trying to chain together wins to stay in the limelight and secure funding. Clarke delved deep into the invisible pressure of indie development during our conversation. While the freedom sounds romantic from an outside perspective, solo developers like Clarke are often faced with hard reality checks that don’t get talked about quite as much. “Sure, it’s free until you can’t eat,” Clarke joked.
“There is this discourse right now, especially with all the AI stuff going on where people are churning stuff out really fast, about what indie is, and is game development art. And it’s both. There’s an art to it and it’s a business. And I think people often ignore the fact that it is a business,” he said. “Yes, I am creating art and making whatever I want and that is extremely freeing and I can technically work on the timeline that I want, but that timeline better sync up with when my bank account is empty.”
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While Playable Archive‘s free status won’t help fill Clarke’s wallet, all that hard work wasn’t for naught. Clarke still sees the project as a chance to gather data points on what players like and don’t like, something that he can use to inform his next game. He also noted that he’s already working on a new project that pulls “some concepts and ideas” from Paranormal Activity: Threshold. The soul of the project may still live on yet, haunting any Paramount executives who watched it die.
Playable Archive is available to play on Steam now for free.
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