What comes next?

Hello again, it's been a while! In this post I'd like to quickly recap where we currently stand and what tidbits of info we've received about the series' future since Soulstorm's release.

TL;DR: Not too much on the Oddworld front, maybe a HD remaster of Oddysee. There also seems to be some activity on non-Oddworld games, but there is nothing concrete.

Obviously, the series story-wise is not even close to being over. Soulstorm ends on a fairly big sequel hook, so it'd be reasonable to expect that its sequel is already around the corner. Yet, as of the writing of this article, this is still not the case.

Oddworld News or The Lack Of Thereof

The earliest "direct" confirmation we've had about OWI working on something was in July, 2022, when Bennie Terry III said the following:

Ashley Hackett: Is there anything going in the Oddworld studio? Like, are you guys creating the new instalment? Are you guys working on something new?

Bennie Terry III: Definitely working on something. Right, I'm nodding my head a lot, because there's, you know, "yes"-es to a lot of that. I can't speak to specifically what it is, what genre it is, what style of play, but what I can say is that there's something really cool, that has a unique visual signature to it, that is Oddworld through and through, but builds from character first.

He also went on to mention, that the team is aware of the fact that it's very tight-lipped right now and that "there's going to be some more openness about things in the next coming months" and that they'd "try to build a more inclusive environment that allows [their] fans to have a voice."

However, he also refused to go into details, citing the fact that old interviews with Lorne Lanning ended up being picked to pieces five years later which "bit him in the ass."

Either way, despite the promise of transparency, no direct announcement has been made since, nor has the public been more involved. The closest thing we have to more info being shared are the various Poddcasts and the #AskLorne Tweets, which are part of a multi-week Q&A session with Lanning.

Since then I occasionally asked members of OWI in private messages, about whether they're working on a new game. Obviously they couldn't tell me anything, but both of them confirmed that the "team is very busy", which at the very least implies that the company isn't in a vegetative state like during the early 2000s after Stranger's Wrath.

Scattered Brains

There is one more piece to the puzzle, that I haven't mentioned until now. That is the company Scattered Brains, which Lorne Lanning is a member of. It was first introduced by its CEO in his LinkedIn profile's description:

Leath Bing: Scattered Brains is a new game studio led by a team of highly-decorated, 30+ year industry veterans contributing to titles such as Oddworld, QQ Dance, Call of Duty Online, Unreal Tournament, Mortal Kombat, and more.

In addition to their decades of individual experience selling tens of millions of copies of beloved games, our team members have worked with each other directly for decades.

The game will incorporate Hollywood-level production values from award-wining animators in its core legacy of compelling visual storytelling, while also incorporating the free-to-play mechanics pioneered by our team at Tencent and digital assets (both in- and out-of-game) for monetization and reinforcement of our core gameplay loop.

It's worth noting that in March, 2024 Bing modified his status on LinkedIn to mention that he became CEO of another company, called CloutcastAI, which is banking on generative AI. Yet, despite this his profile's description remained the same, leaving it unclear whether he is still involved or not.

Circling back to Scattered Brains, the company is very secretive at the moment, with little online presence beyond appearing in company registries. Observant fans noticed, however, that it already has a few live trademarks, which allow us to speculate on the sort of games they're planning.

First and foremost, to jumpscare all readers, the company was originally looking into making NFT projects as evidenced by their "NFTalent" and "NFTalent Agency" trademarks.

Interestingly, these trademarks were submitted after OWI publicly confirmed that they will not be creating Oddworld NFTs:

OWI_Dan: With the AI art, we thought it would be cool to tap into the current AI art trend and see what we could come up with to celebrate Halloween along with Abe, it was more a fun activation for our social channels. I understand your concerns and I'll relay these back to the team.

Re: NFTs, yes aware of them and no we won't be doing any.

Thankfully both of these trademarks are now expired and the company's other (still active) trademarks excised all mentions of NFTs from their scope definition since. I figure someone realized they're neither as lucrative as NFTbros wanted us to believe, nor exactly a good source of goodwill from people.

Speaking of these still active trademarks, there's two---not counting the one for the name "Scattered Brains" itself. The former is "DEDEX", which is currently in its earliest state of submission and is therefore likely either a canned or future project. The other, more interesting one is titled "Planet of the Pests", which is at the time of writing marked "pending for opposition," which is legalese for "object now or forever hold your peace," i.e. the final period before a trademark can be activated fully.

Not only that, but in May, 2024, I noticed that Bennie Terry III was actually play-testing / working on a development build of the game, making it the closest we have to a physical confirmation of the existence of a new OWI-related game.

Similarly, Lanning went on record in March to mention the following:

Lorne Lanning: I wanna focus on new content, y'know? And then we started a new venture, we haven't exposed yet. But, let's say, I have a working multiplayer prototype. This is the most exciting thing I've ever built and we're getting some of the reaction to that.

While he makes absolutely no mention of "Planet of the Pests," he did mention in another comment, that his team switched from Unity to Unreal Engine. With this in mind, I don't think it is a great stretch to assume he was talking about the same game.

Update (February 9th, 2025): Trademark Updates and LinkedIn Changes

Since then there have been two notable changes when it comes to Scattered Brains.

Firstly, the trademarks have progressed:

• the trademark for "Scattered Brains" had received its "Notice of Allowance". In super laymen's terms this means that the trademark is one step from being finalized and is extremely unlikely to be turned down from this point forwards,
• Planet of the Pests also received its own Notice of Allowance,
• DEDEX is currently has the status of "PUBLICATION/ISSUE REVIEW COMPLETE", which means it's a step further than the other two, but has regardless passed examinations and will be published in the official Trademark Gazette,
• NFTalent and NFTalent Agency are both (thankfully) still abandoned.

The other interesting thing I've noticed is that almost all the people, who the Oddworld Library mentioned as working for Scattered Brains have changed their LinkedIn profiles:

• Alanna Lausch, Stephen Gray, and Leath Bing have all removed explicit mentions of Scattered Brains from their profiles, instead replacing these with "Stealth Startup". A "Stealth Startup" is, as the name implies, a company which hasn't yet launched its product and is working in secrecy so to prevent competitors from sussing out what exactly they are doing. Why they started out public, but then decided to go dark is unclear to me.
• Anthony Palma meanwhile seems to have completely removed the company from his profile.
• Lorne Lanning's profile also mentions "working in stealth", however, if I recall correctly, he had it this way since the beginning.
• Bennie Terry III's profile is the only one which still proudly displays "Chief Product Officer | Co-Founder" for Scattered Brains, however, it also shows him leaving Oddworld Inhabitants in April, 2023. Whether this is just a bureaucratic thing (no point in being in two since he works with LL either way) or a sign of times changing (he did post about delivering a completely unrelated product, named Realize Music Sing) is not clear.

One more interesting thing about Lanning's profile is the background image he set:

There is no further context to this image, but it definitely doesn't look like Oddworld.

Update (August 13th, 2025): New Trademark and a Potential Website

A new trademark has appeared for Scattered Brains, called WARSPORT. It is too early to say anything else about it, as it has only been submitted into the record the day before this update was written, however, it shows that the company is still stealthily making moves.

OWF member Sgabbit also discovered that https://scatteredbrains.com/ is owned by an Arizona company, which is where Scattered Brains is located. The domain also exchanged hands in October, 2024 (see WHOIS records). The website is currently completely empty.

Update (November 12th, 2025): Planet of the Pests' Trademark is Dead

The trademark for Planet of the Pests has been marked abandoned on the 6th of October. What this means is that unless Scattered Brains petitions for the reinstatement of the trademark till the 6th of December, they will lose their claim to the name. Even this wouldn't necessarily mean PotP, the game is dead, only that it must be released under a different name or the trademark process has to be restarted from scratch. It is possible one of the company's other trademarks, DEDEX or WARSPORT, will end up being the game's final name, though we don't really have any proof for or against either.

Trademark summary:

• Planet of the Pests, Abandoned on the 6th of October,
• Scattered Brains, Active, second Statement of Use extension out of five,
• WARSPORT, Submitted, no updates yet,
• DEDEX, Active, first SOU extension out of five,
• The NFT stuff is still thankfully dead.

LinkedIn updates:

Bennie Terry III's summary for Scattered brains now states the following:

LinkedIn: As Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Scattered Brains, We pioneered the Elastic Studio model an adaptive, resource-efficient globally distributed production system that empowers indie teams to deliver AAA-quality results more efficently.

DeepWell Digital Therapeutics

What's this? A surprise challenger?

Indeed, beyond Scattered Brains, Lanning is involved in yet another company. Aside from sounding like a company straight out of Cruelty Squad, there's at least more info about this venture, including an actually released game.

The company's website describes it as the following:

DeepWell DTx: We make fun video games that deliver powerful mental health treatments that keep you coming back to play.

Their first game, Zengence, is a rhythm-shooter (think Beat Saber, except with guns), which you control with your breathing. The intent is that by focusing on and being mindful of your breathing, you can let go of stress and calm down.

How effective this is and how fun the game is are beyond the scope of this post as I'm not qualified to answer either of these questions, but it's a neat concept either way.

Going back to Lanning, notably he isn't anything as pivotal as "director" or "co-founder" when it comes to DeepWell. Rather, he is named as part of the so-called Collaborative Advisory Council:

Whether he was actively involved in the creation of Zengence is not known, however, considering that he hasn't mentioned it in his social media, I'm inclined to lean towards that he wasn't.

A Curious Tweet

The most recent project-related thing we had from Lanning was the following Tweet:

Lorne Lanning: As an artist, it's essential to keep creating. Here are some early creature/character concepts I've recently worked on and wanted to share with you all.

The post also contained two pieces of concept art, leading some to believe we're seeing art for a new project.

Yet, not too long afterwards, Lanning clarified that the pictures are not his, as they were drawn by Farzad Varahramyan and that they aren't new, as they're old Oddworld concept art. He did, however, also say that "new recent work is still incubating," which might refer to PotP or another unknown project.

He doubled down later in another post with the following:

Lorne Lanning: I want to emphasize that while I've been a driving force, it's truly been a team effort, with many talented people contributing to the IP in incredible ways. I don’t feel the age; I feel like I’m just getting started! Hopefully we will be able to share some new things soon!

Sherry McKenna's (not-)Retirment

Update (March 9th, 2025): On February 28th, 2025 Sherry McKenna commented the following under a Reddit post, causing many fans great alarm:

Sherry McKenna: Can you reach out and get approval. Not sure whom you deal with. But I’m sure it will be ok but if you could check with whoever ever you’re in contact with… I’m retired or I would do it. Thx

Taking the comment at face value, fans started speculating what such a sudden retirement could mean for the series and what would happen next. However, a few days later on the 4th of March, a user claiming to be Holly Newman, posted the following:

Confident_Throat_223: Ha,ha,ha! Sherry has a good sense of humor. Her idea of retired is that she doesn’t work 60 hour work weeks anymore, I communicate with her about business pretty much daily so I know she is NOT retired. As for Lorne, I would say he is still a bit of a Type A worker and personally I wish he took more breaks, but that guy loves his work. Forever Odd—Holly

This was soon followed by another comment from McKenna:

Sherry McKenna I’m not really retired retired. But I bet it would be fun. I just love OW and the story. I especially like when folks “get” how it applies. Anyway. Basically when I said I was retired, I was just basically lazy. 😵

HD Background Appears on OWI's Facebook

Update (November 18th, 2025): On the 11th of November, 2025, OWI replaced their Facebook cover photo from a Soulstorm promotional one, to what appears to be a HD remastered version of a background from the Stockyards level of Abe's Oddysee.

What struck me as suspicious about this is that it doesn't really seem sensible from a marketing perspective to cover your prime advertising space with an image from an old game, especially when previously said space was used to promote your newest product... Unless, of course, if you have plans with the old game.

To confirm my suspicions, I messaged OWI's community manager asking whether she can provide some details about the screen. Her answer was the following:

OWI_Katie: I will find out if I'm allowed to say more and get back to you.

At which point I joked about "AbeHD coming in 2026", to which she replied this:

OWI_Katie: Maybe, maybe not?

Just also remember that half the community thought there was a new game because I crocheted Alf and made a series of videos about it. Sometimes things are just for fun.

And also remember that I am very boringly not allowed to talk about things so don't get me in trouble trying to grill me.

Respecting her request, I dropped the topic here, saying if and when she can say something more, I'd be very excited to hear it, but otherwise I understand how things are. NDAs are no joke, kids! If you've read this and think you can surely figure out more, please don't go and harass the developers.

As for the conclusions that one may draw from her words are twofold:

The pessimistic reading is that this is just a cool little cover picture that they made for fun and nostalgia points, and we are just seeing too many mountains into molehills.... which, to be fair, certainly wouldn't be the first time. I myself have fallen victim to assuming more of community events than they were.

However, there is also an optimistic reading of this, which is that they are in fact planning something with the old games for 2026. Assuming this really is the case, the most likely candidate would be—based on the weird graphical artifacts seen on the pictures—an AI-upscaled remaster of Oddysee.

And seeing that fans have already created something like this using little more than proverbial ducttape and sheer grit, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for OWI to do the same, just with a lot more resources and also utilizing the actual original assets.

Some users on OWF's Discord even posited that there seem to be details on the picture, that an AI could not come up with (for instance, the unlit rocks having visible texture), so it is possible that what we're seeing is an AI-upscale of an original, uncompressed asset.

Personally, I'm cautiously leaning towards the optimistic reading or at the very least towards the opinion, that the picture is in fact teasing something instead of being a mere ad-hoc background change. I base this on the fact that the CM didn't say "Oh, I just changed that for fun" or anything conclusively dismissive and thus put an end to any speculation without revealing OWI's hand. In instances like this a non-answer is an answer too.

I guess we'll see in less than a year.

Thanks for reading!