No, LA Noire Devs Aren’t Making a Spin-off/Sequel

So this is one that’s a bit weird and all over the place, with social media posts that have since been deleted, the team releasing a statement to clarify, and further speculation. So it all started the other day when Australian musician Freyja Garbett took to Instagram in a now-deleted social media post talking about a “Huge” project, “writing for a video game.” Garbett, according to Eurogamer, posted: “From the creators of LA Noire comes Sowden House, a psychological thriller also set in the 1940s in LA that will have you questioning your sanity.”

Calm down, don’t get too excited. There is the quote yet to come from Team Bondi creative director and founder, Brendan McNamara, and founder of the new studio Video Games Deluxe. Hopes were, however, stoked by those wannabe Detective Phelps-es on the LA Noire Reddit, finding that Sowden House (the project’s namesake) was the residence of physician George Hodel, a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder, which was referenced in the LA Noire mission “The Quarter Moon Murders.” Nonetheless, the cold bottle of urine over your hopes is that it is just a name and not ironclad proof of a sequel.

The update to the story in the last 48 hours from publishing is that we know more about it thanks to Video Games Deluxe itself. The statement published on LinkedIn reads:

“A statement for news regarding ‘Sowden House.‘

We are working exclusively on projects for Rockstar. We commissioned some music from a local composer[,] Freyja Garbett[,] for a VR project that we were working on a number of years ago when between projects. It is based on a case from LA Noire that did not make the cut but was more of a tech demo than anything else. We have no idea whether this will ever see the light of day[,] but we decided to finish the score commission to support a local composer.”

Listening to some of Garbett’s music, which I will say isn’t for everyone, is certainly jazz-influenced and could fit with the rumored aspects we know so far. From those details, it certainly sounds like an interesting idea from the studio, something I think a lot of people will want to see the light of day simply for the vague connections to LA Noire. As the studio notes, maybe it could see the light of day, maybe not.

It could also be possible that with this information now out there, the public interest could vaguely see renewed interest in the project from production. However, as should be noted, projects like this happen all the time within studios. Many of these smaller projects are started as tests of mechanics, tests of ideas for larger projects, and other reasons. So don’t get hung up on a headline like “LA Noire Devs making spin-off/sequel?” On those, I’d press X/square to doubt.