One of this year's most anticipated games is dead

Bad news, horror fans: The long-awaited collaboration between celebrated game maker Hideo Kojima and monster movie director Guillermo del Toro - "Silent Hills" - appears to be dead in the water.

The news was confirmed by Konami, the Japanese company publishing the game, as well as Norman Reedus, the actor who led his face and voice to the game's main character.

Here's the full statement from Konami (via Kotaku):

Konami is committed to new Silent Hill titles, however the embryonic 'Silent Hills' project developed with Guillermo del Toro and featuring the likeness of Norman Reedus will not be continued. In terms of Kojima and Del Toro being involved, discussions on future Silent Hill projects are currently underway, and please stay tuned for further announcements.

It all started last month when GameSpot discovered that Hideo Kojima, the longtime director at Konami and the head of the "Silent Hills" project, was getting ready to leave the company once his next game, "Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain," was complete. Since then, the relationship between Kojima and Konami has appeared to be on the rocks, with Konami pulling Kojima's regular podcast series and removing his name from several areas of its website.

Then, this past weekend, a source close to filmmaker Guillermo del Toro told IGN that his collaboration on the game "Silent Hills" is "not gonna happen... you'll have to go after Konami for those answers."

And then on Sunday, actor Norman Reedus, who was confirmed to be playing the lead character in "Silent Hills," tweeted a link to a story saying Konami had canceled the game.

Konami told GameSpot that "our contract period with [Norman] Reedus has expired," but added, "We will continue to develop the Silent Hill series." However, that game would be completed without the three major players working on the previous project, including Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro, and Norman Reedus.

This is a major blow to horror game fans, and anyone who played last year's spectacular free demo "P.T.," which I called the best game experience from 2014.

Though "P.T." was unrelated to "Silent Hills," it offered fans a taste of things to come: A simple but incredibly detailed environment with no guide - just a series of clues that you need to find and decipher. It's beautiful, fascinating, and terrifying all at once, and the game takes a surprising level of collaboration: For example, you can't beat the final puzzle of "P.T." unless you know how to speak a myriad of different languages.

It's unclear why or how this game ran off the tracks, but we've reached out to Konami and Norman Reedus' publicist to learn more.