The next time you think you are too late compared to the steps you had set yourself, or that you have ideas that are out of time, remember KIEN. This tenacious Italian video game project, in fact, was imagined for GameBoy Advance and was supposed to be released in 2002. Instead it was released in 2024, just a few days ago.\r\nThe announcement, which takes on the boundaries of real curiosity, has arrived from the publisher Incube8 Games, who announced the arrival of the game from the local team AgeofGames, available (obviously) with a physical cartridge, as was done in the days of the GameBoy Advance (you can see it on the publisher’s official website).\r\nBorn in the early 2000s, KIEN survived three failed releases and entered the spiral of what seemed like a curse, which prevented it from reaching shelves for a full twenty-two years.\r\n\r\nIt is a platform d action, with some role-playing elements, which engages players over the course of around twenty levels, with a non-linear structure.\r\n”Kien is challenging, in a certain sense it is a pre-souls game” observed Fabio Belsanti, lead game designer of the project, on the occasion of the release. «The battles are always very intense and difficult. The missions and paths between the different levels and worlds are really tortuous and must be discovered by playing, making mistakes and dying. Many players will love this game, but others will certainly not love it.”\r\nIn short, an important challenge, as indeed happened to be found a few years ago in platformers – some of which, without too much warning, condemned us to die and die and dying before getting to the bottom of it, with very bad but stimulating level design ideas.\r\nAnd, considering that managing to publish a game despite such a troubled development was far from easy, the authors add: «the lessons learned were numerous, but the main one is that willpower is an indispensable key to finishing a video game project, which is a very complicated process to complete”.\r\nAnd just imagine keeping that willpower unchanged twenty-two years later!