Zarf Updates

Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish.

To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was set in the golden age (and Age) of the cryptic D'ni civilization, centuries before Atrus and his family.

Cyan spent four months building a fully playable prototype of Anglerfish. They pitched it to publishers. They did not get funding. They shelved the game and laid off half the company. Phooey.

Last week, Wired published an article with more details. What we learn here is that Cyan pitched the game in early 2025, at DICE Summit and GDC.

Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.

-- from "No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore", Adam Morgan via Wired, 05-Aug-2026

I was at that GDC! I had no idea this was going on, of course. I'm not in on private publisher pitch meetings; I just hang out in the park. What I remember is that Cyan surprise-launched the Age of Rime that weekend, which made me scream because I had to download Myst 2020 over hotel wifi to play it.

...And then, a week later, the news about layoffs at Cyan. So yeah. Not a lot of slack between "we didn't get funding" and "we gotta put the company in low-burn hibernation mode."

One more quote from Eric Anderson. This confirms something I knew but didn't have a direct reference for. To wit, the word "partially":

EAA: "I don't think people realize the true cost of developing games," Anderson says, having used Kickstarter to partially fund two of Cyan's past titles. "A million dollars seems like a ton of money, but it doesn't even come close to covering the full cost of a production like Anglerfish."

Hannah Gamiel closes by saying that Cyan is self-sustaining at its present small size.

HG: We’re going to see a lot more studio closures in the future as a result of this funding issue, but Cyan won’t be one of them.

They're working on a smaller-scale Myst-universe game codenamed Mudfish. The "MUD" calls back to "MUDPIE", the circa-2000 multi-user-Myst proposal that became Myst Online. What does that mean? We don't know...

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...But wait, we know more!

In the course of writing that Wired article, Adam Morgan got a hands-on tour of the Anglerfish demo itself. He just posted about the experience:

Since most of my reporting was left on the cutting room floor, with Cyan’s permission I wanted to give fans of the Myst franchise a closer look at Anglerfish—as well as some exclusive new details about Mudfish, the new game Cyan is currently working on.

-- from "I've seen the lost 'Myst' game—and we're all losers (for now)", Adam Morgan, 06-Aug-2026

I'll resist the temptation to quote the whole article. The high points:

• The actor behind Guildmaster Damreus is Noshir Dalal. He's been in a bunch of high-end games that I haven't played (not my genre). Notably he voiced the title character in the English localization of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
• You play a member of the Guild of Surveyors doing Damreus a favor. He sends you to the Age containing his family pied-à-livre, a mansion built on an old mining site. You're apparently looking for a Prison Book.
• But you can't advance very far in the mansion. So you return to D'ni, where Damreus says that he'll help you by modifying the Linking Book. (Really the Descriptive Book, don't get on me.)
• You return to the vacation Age, which is now stormy and somewhat messed-up.
• As we know from the trailer, you eventually find Damreus's lost book -- and then lose it, which makes him very cranky. The implication is that he starts using his alteration powers in increasingly scary ways.
• The demo was about two hours of playtime, and what was there was fully playable.
• The whole Riven team worked on it except Richard Vander Wende. "So the headcount was in the neighborhood of 30."

More quotes:

"People are asking if we're going release the demo to the public, and the answer is no for a variety of reasons," Anderson says. "We didn't tune it for puzzle density, so there's not a ton here in terms of puzzles. And then another reason is that it reveals things that would spoil the core idea of the game. We're keeping those things very close because we would love to rekindle the project one day. The core idea is what made us so passionate about it, and that core idea is still alive and well."

HG: "A Kickstarter, based on our experience of having run and successfully completed Kickstarters, would not have covered the amount we needed to make this game come to life. The quality bar for our games continues to increase over time, so the cost does, too."

EAA: "It's definitely not canceled. It's not like we chose to walk away from it. We simply couldn't secure the financing we needed. But this iteration of Anglerfish is gone because the the team that made it is not at Cyan right now. Some still are, but a lot of key individuals that contributed to this are not currently here. If we were to revisit this in the future, which I would absolutely love to do, it will probably shift and morph and become something that looks a lot different."

-- ibid

The context here is that Cyan never cancels a game. They cancel development on a game. The game concept goes back on the shelf. As Eric implies, any idea can be revisited in a new form. (Remember, the first pitch for Obduction was a narrative shooter game!)

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And Mudfish? Again, read the post. The descriptive quote:

EAA: "With Mudfish, the focus is on interactions. How does it feel to touch things in the game world -- to interact with objects that you find around you?"

[...] "Imagine a game that doesn't take place over a sprawling landscape, but maybe takes place in a library that has additional wings you can unlock. Or maybe little jaunts into attached ages."

Again, this reminds me intensely of The Room series, which took the Myst formula and focused it down to a puzzle-box on the table in front of you. Moving levers, turning keys, prodding for secret panels. But this is my speculation, not news.

Further notes:

• Mudfish is also set in pre-Fall D'ni.
• They didn't say a word about multi-player. That too is pure speculation. All we know is that a Mysterium attendee asked Eric if the name connection to "MUDPIE" was intentional; Eric said yes.
• Clearly, Mudfish is scoped for Cyan's current reduced state. They are actively working on it, but no dates or promises.

EAA: "It’s very early, so we’re mostly focused on systems building right now, and the narrative and character details are still very much in flux. We would love to share more about Mudfish at Mysterium next summer, but we’ll see how the year goes."

I hope Cyan's year goes well. As I hope for all of us. And I will see you at Mysterium 2027.