Three hundred and thirty-three. That’s the number of pages in our forum thread on Toonuva Games’ The Wild, which shows how interested our readers are in this game. Yet, The Wild is currently one of the App Store’s greatest mysteries since we haven’t heard anything from its developers since March, right when they were about to release a Testflight build. If you haven’t heard anything about The Wild, then you probably haven’t been around our Upcoming iPhone and iPad Games thread for the last year or so. According to the description of the game, The Wild was going to be a single-player survival game with lots of exploring and discovering. It was supposed to feature day/night cycles, crafting, a weather system (exposure etc), vast spaces to traverse, and even underwater exploration.

The more time the developers spent on the game, the more ambitious their project became (they added procedurally-generated islands, for instance). They also really listened to the forum members, trying to make the game as good as possible and exciting everyone in the process. They even came out with a live-action teaser trailer and also promised to release the game’s original soundtrack on iTunes once the game was done. In other words, the screenshots, the seemingly-sincere promises of great features, and the continuous communication between developers and future players really made everyone think that The Wild would be an iOS gem.

And then, just like a lone survivor who walks into the icy lands never to be seen again, The Wild disappeared around March. Just after Radiation Island, a similarly-themed survival game by Atypical Games, was released in February, The Wild‘s developers stopped writing in the game’s forum page and on its Twitter account (the account continues to exist but nothing tweeted from it relates to the game). The timing between Radiation Island coming out and The Wild going into silent mode may be a coincidence, but it may not be. Now, the game’s webpage, which was also the page set up for the Testflight applications, is a 404-Page Not Found dead-end, one more clue that something very odd has happened to this game.

I’ve no idea what exactly happened to The Wild because an event like this one is quite rare; you don’t see games that appear to be well-funded, are anxiously-awaited, and are designed by motivated developers just disappear with absolutely no explanation. As I’m an eternal optimist, I hope this silence is because the game changed hands or something along those lines rather than because the development of the game has simply ceased for reasons unknown to us. We’ve reached out to the developers to find out what happened, and we’ll definitely let you know if we hear anything back. I hope that we soon find out where The Wild went and, perhaps, end up seeing the game released at some point in the (near or far) future.

Update: After more than 3 months of silence, Toonuva Games finally showed signs of life on its Facebook page a day after our story was published. The Facebook entry states that the developers are working super hard and that a new site will be coming soon. I’m glad we’ve finally heard something about the game, but it’s still quite peculiar that a game that was so front and center in our community for so many months went dark for so long. Hopefully we’ll see the game come out in the near, or even far, future.