Picassio was a stealth / thief game that was in development at Promethean Designs, in which the player would have had to steal artworks to “win” a bet with another thief. The project had a long development cycle: it started as a Dreamcast game, then it was postponed and passed through PS2 and GameCube. In all that time the only playable build that was made was a very basic one, and is the one that you can see in the video below: basically the character creeping about and some very basic AI. Most of the gameplay ideas did not get implemented at all. It seems that they started the game with a man protagonist in mind, but in later screens we can see a woman as the main character, so it could have been changed to appeal more to the young public.
The project got radically changed halfway through development when the company boss saw the then newly released Shenmue and basically decided to copy it. Picassio then turned into a half adventure, half stealth type game but didn’t get any further than some character/level designs before getting canned. The company fell into severe financial difficulty and employees weren’t being paid for months. Subsequently they all left to work elsewhere and Promethean Designs went bust.
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Videos:
Picassio Beta Trailer
