Statement from Developer + Temporarily Pulling From Sale

Hello everyone,

This is the publisher here, just relaying a message from the developer, Suzaku. Please read below:

This morning after looking at player feedback and negative reviews from over night, we came to a hard decision with our publisher Top Hat Studios to temporarily pull Sense from sale until the apparent design issues and bugs can be fixed and adjusted. We have contacted Valve to facilitate this, and this should be done within the next 24 hours. The Steam page will remain up. This is pretty crushing for us in a lot of ways, but we are doing what we think is right. Although this is a monetary hit, we have decided the game is not up to par with what we expected to ship, and that QA feedback rounds did not fully reflect player experiences. When we set out to make the game, I wanted to make a game in the method of old school survival horror titles like Fatal Frame , Resident Evil, and most importantly Clock Tower. This meant very limited saves, deep exploration, repeated trial and error, punishing deaths, and a reliance on careful reading and planning your actions are the things; things I find engaging about those older titles. I wanted to bring those aspects back first and foremost. At this point it is pretty clear that I failed to do those systems justice and in adhering to these design tenets made the game too frustratingly hard. While most of the minor bugs and issues can be fixed easily, we realize gameplay chains and systems cannot. However, we can add tools to help smooth out these issues, and make the game better for everyone involved.Sense will return to sale on PC once everything has been fixed with an update to version 1.1. It will contain, in the very least the following fixes: - The resolution settings bug has been fixed. Your chosen settings will now save and not reset when opening the menu or moving the window to alternate monitors. - The method for escaping in the elevator on the first ghost event in the lobby will have it’s failure state removed, forcing the elevator to open by the ghost’s proximity. You will no longer need to spam the interact button to succeed. - We are adding defaykt journal items with clear explanations of controls, saving, use of the sword, and other apparently confusing aspects. These will be unlocked and in the journal tab from the beginning of the game, and the player will be prompted to check them.- We will either add an auto save/checkpoint at the beginning of each floor, OR allow quick saving anywhere from the main menu. We will keep the tapes/save stations as is for people who want to try the challenge of limited saves. We have not decided which option is best, but are leaning towards quick save. - the death screen audio bug has been resolved. - the “Sweet Home” achievement not unlocking has been resolved. - the esc key now brings up the pause menu instead of enter.- we are also looking into various reported smaller interaction chain bugs which were not found in QASeparately, we have also discovered a problem related to save data corruption that occurs if you have save data from the old demo which has now been removed. If you have already purchased Sense and have yet to play, but played the demo. Please make sure that you delete any files related to the demo before playing the full game as it causes some strange issues with flags in the early game. We apologize for this.Thank you to everyone who showed up on day 1 and gave us feedback. I am personally sorry that our launch stumbled like this and hope that you will give the game another chance once we get this update out. I especially am sorry to backers to whom may have been disappointed by this launch. I take responsibility for this and apologize. We will fix this, as we want players to know we care about their experience with the game.For those wondering or worried about console releases, this will not affect anything related to console nor physicals. Our console releases will launch with these things fixed. This also does not effect the PSVita release or timeline.

This has been a hard decision but we want to do what's right. We realize many players are disappointed and it feels unfair for us to continue to sell the game knowing that, until these issues can be mended. Both us and Suzaku believe players are at the forefront of the industry and do not feel it is right to continue to sell the game while this happens. We are disappointed ourselves in this but we know it is the right thing to do. While the game is still for sale as of posting this, we've contacted Valve to temporarily pull sales. It will be reinstated once everything is fixed and we can QA the game once more.

We encourage you to follow the game with the "follow" button to be notified of its re-release.

Please note if you have bought or redeemed the game this will not affect anything. You will still be able to play the game.