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.
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. Development 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.
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