Blade Kitten is one of those games that just didn’t get enough attention. Admittedly it was a bit overpriced for most players when it was released, but the anime cartroon-styled side scroller was recently dropped permanently to 800 MSP. It’s a fairly solid platformer with brilliant cinematics. If you haven’t checked it out we suggest you give the trial a whirl.

But the real kicker is that news recently surfaced of Blade Kitten 2, something many of us thought to be abandoned after Krome Studios was forced to make major cuts last year. Several news outlets reported operations were shut down entirely, but a short time later Krome CEO Robert Walsh was contacted by IGN. He had this to say in their interview:

“Basically, all we’re doing now is working on paying project,” he said. “One of the things that Krome’s done over the years is that we’ve tried to keep staff on as long as possible, when we didn’t necessarily have paying work. To be really honest, that’s pretty much led to our current position. We probably kept 100, 120 people on, waiting for work to come in. Now we’ve just… you know, our business model doesn’t work, and we’re just working on the stuff that we know is real, and moving forward in that way. The other thing that we’re doing, too, is that we’re keeping a smaller, core team to do contract work, as opposed to keeping massive overheads. Where the dollar is now, you can’t afford to keep people on, to carry them through the peaks and the troughs.”

How many Krome staff remain? “Realistically, we have at least 40 doing work on projects. We’re potentially going to get about another 40-45; I’ll find out in the next day or two, if this project goes ahead. And then we have another project that comes up in a couple of weeks, which could [require] another 40 people. So it’s going to be anywhere between 30 and 100. It’s pretty much just a smaller version of what [Krome] was.”

Apparently that project is Blade Kitten 2. In addition to the video above another can be found on Creative Director Steve Stamatiadis’ YouTube Channel which shows yet another cutscene for the second game. Additional proof can also be found on the Blade Kitten blog, where for the first time since January a post was made June 12 promoting the game’s videos and new items such as comics and the original game’s soundtrack for purchase.

It’s always nice to see a studio survive. Far too many are closing down in these troubled times. We wish Krome the best of luck and hope they take a look at porting Ty The Tasmanian Tiger to XBLA next.