The Invisible Hours, for those who’ve not heard of it, is a game by the now-shuttered Tequila Works. A game studio you might know for games like Rime and Gylt, or its last title before it was shut down, Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story. When Riot cut its indie publishing label, Riot Forge, Tequila Works struggled to secure funding for its next project and subsequently shut down a year later. When it shut down, a thing that doesn’t happen with every game studio being shut down happened to Tequila Works. The rights for its IPs and assets were sold at auction.
If you had the cash and were an adoring fan of, say, Gylt, you could place your bid to officially own the full rights to the game, lock, stock, and barrel. Rob Yescombe, however, a writer who has been the lead writer on and written for games such as Rime, The Invisible Hours, The Division, The Precinct, and Arizona Sunshine II, who has also recently written films such as Jackpot! and Outside the Wire, saw a unique opportunity.
“Well, the truth of it is that it was a very, very, rare opportunity. When we made this game, with Tequila Works, a Spanish company that was probably best known for making Rime, which I also wrote. Sadly, this year, they went bust, and as is the course in Spain, when a company shuts down, their assets and IP go to auction. And it’s extraordinarily rare for any artist to have an opportunity to own something they’ve made. Unless you’re running your own company, your whole career, you’re a gun for hire. And I thought, ‘Well, when am I ever going to get another shot at this?’”
Fortunately for Yescombe, not only did this once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity appear, it lined up with a project that, seemingly more than some of his other works, was extremely close to his heart. In a press release announcing that he had secured the rights and planned to remaster the game, he said he “adored working on The Invisible Hours. Truly, the best creative experience of my life,” a sentiment he echoed in our conversation when I asked him why The Invisible Hours was his pick of the games he worked on to bring back.
“This is the one that I have to say is probably closest to my heart, because this was a moment in my career where Raúl Rubio, who was the creative director at Tequila Works, and I trusted each other implicitly, because we had made Rime together and it had gone really well. And The Invisible Hours was such a unique production because I was given enormous creative leeway. Essentially a creative blank check. Not in terms of money, but creatively, given carte blanche, to make something of my own. It still means the world to me, I still talk to the cast and with the people who made it. It’s just one of those productions where we were all there because we loved making it, and I think that still resonates inside of it, I think you can feel when you play it that people who loved it, made it.“
Yescombe moved quickly when The Invisible Hours was up for grabs. The rights for Tequila Works’ games went up this past April, and by June, he was telling anyone who would listen that he planned to bring the game back. The plan, as it currently stands, is to remaster The Invisible Hours for modern headsets such as Meta’s Quest 3 and even perhaps the PlayStation VR2, and once the remaster is complete and on shelves (or rather, on head(sets)), he hopes to move forward with a screen adaptation, whether as a film or TV show.
On the question of changing or adding anything to the game, he was hesitant to commit to saying that he would make changes, though he did add that the one thing he wished he could’ve done at the time, was find a way to make the game more social, which could also bolster its appeal in this current era of social games having taken off to new heights since 2020. He even went further to suggest a version of the game that’s timed, where players have to run through as much of the story as possible, and submit what they believe to be the solution to the mystery at the end.
“Something I would have loved to have done at the time is find a way to make it more social, because as it stands, it’s a single-player experience. What I would love to do is to say ‘hey, let’s all three of us go bomb around the mansion and reconvene at the end of each chapter, and see, well, what did you learn?’ I think that would be really fun, and I think Meta is moving increasingly more towards social, and there’s overlap there in their interests and the things that I would like to do that I think would be good for both of us.“
He’s also not planning to start his own new studio to make the remaster. He intends to work with a team that’s already up and running and more than capable of pulling the job off. Considering how many studios in the last five years alone have tried to setup a game studio and release a blockbuster debut game at the same time, who’ve also shuttered in the last five years because starting a company is a difficult thing on its own even before you add the challenges of game making, I’d say Yescombe has the right approach in mind.
I was curious, though, as to why he didn’t skip past remastering the game and went straight towards doing a screen adaptation. I was also curious as to why Yescombe doesn’t just stick to writing films, after two recent successful outings with 2021’s Outside the Wire and 2024’s Jackpot!.
“I think that the pleasure of writing movies is, you get to polish it to a high shine, and then it’s a product that goes out. But, the joy of writing games is, ultimately, the final product is a collaboration between me, and someone who I’m never going to meet, who is the player. And together, we’re going to create the final experience. My education was in fine art, I thought I wanted to be a fine artist, and I was really taken at the time when I was at art school, with the idea that when you walk into a gallery, you’re not allowed to touch anything. I always wanted to make things that were about, deconstructing the gallery space, collaborating with artist to make the final thing, which is an experience between the art the artist tried to make and the way I receive and interact with it, and that’s ultimately what led me into games. And so, that’s still the thing that keeps me there. Because I’m so excited to like, hop on Twitch, and see someone playing [for example] Arizona Sunshine II, and they’ve done something that reveals some hidden piece of dialogue I thought they would never find. And I love that they made the effort, and that they saw that I had something in place for them. And I also love to see when they find the holes that we didn’t fill. It sounds disappointing in a way, but really, it’s exciting to see ‘Did I manage to catch all the drops?’ Or did they find something that I didn’t find, and we’re discovering what the game can be together? That’s the part that I love.“
Even if remastering the game was always going to be the first step, I was still curious as to why Yescombe was focused on remastering The Invisible Hours for VR. As someone who has been playing, following, and now covering games for years, VR has remained a niche market. In fact, I even said that it feels like VR has been ‘the next best thing’ each year for the last decade. But Yescombe isn’t fazed by that kind of talk. He and the team at Tequila Works weren’t fazed back when they first made The Invisible Hours, even if he admitted that they “perhaps mistakenly” listened to some advice they had received from an entity that Yescombe stipulates, “was not a hardware maker,” and was instead an analyst firm “whose job it was to project hardware sales” that predicted PSVR would sell 6 million units by the fourth quarter of the fiscal year it was launching in.
Obviously, that’s not what happened, but the fact that myself, and millions of other players didn’t get the chance to play The Invisible Hours when it first launched, makes for a greater opportunity now in Yescombe’s mind, considering how much bigger VR is in 2025.
“We came out, out of the gate, into a market that didn’t exist. The Invisible Hours reviewed critically really well, people loved it. Players reviewed it really well, but the market didn’t exist. So now here we are, almost 10 years later, there’s probably something like 20 million [Meta] Quests in the wild, a bunch of people with SteamVR, and whatever else is coming down the pipeline, and to all of those tens of millions of potential players, this is essentially a new product that they don’t even know exists. And so the notion is, hey, we’ve got a product that has been tested very extensively by this small audience, let’s remaster it, let’s make it look beautiful again for a modern audience and just bring them that experience.”
Yescombe later added that they also intend to remaster the flat screen versions of the game that were released after the VR version, and also points out that The Invisible Hours is, by nature, one of the most accessible VR titles available. It doesn’t rely on heavy game mechanics or frequent movement; instead, it’s all about peeling back the layers of the story and getting the chance to stand in the middle of the action, follow the characters you want, and discover how it all unfolds in a unique, firsthand way. There’s complexity to be found for those who want to pick up everything not bolted down and dig as deep as possible, but enjoying The Invisible Hours isn’t prohibited by your knowledge or experience of playing games and playing VR games. “You can do the version where you’re almost inside a piece of theatre, and everybody is going to get an interesting, and what will feel like, a bespoke experience.”
We’re still a long way out from seeing The Invisible Hours return to headsets and screens, and an even longer way out from seeing it reach the big or small screen in a film or TV adaptation. But Yescombe’s enthusiasm for the game and his clear love for telling stories in games has me hopeful that he is able to get the chance to bring The Invisible Hours to as many gamers and viewers alike.
I’m also hopeful that I’ll be able to learn more about what his other ongoing project is, as he shared with me that he’s working on a project he absolutely cannot discuss yet, with The Quarry and Until Dawn writer, Will Byles, whom he was actually going to be seeing soon after our Zoom conversation.
“I can’t say what it is, by Will Byles and I, we’re working on something together right now. I literally can say nothing about it, but we’re working on something. In fact we’re seeing each other imminently.“
Thank you to Rob Yescombe for speaking with me and being so generous with your time and answers.
This interview was edited for clarity.
