Following its abrupt cancellation earlier this year, Rare’s Everwild has briefly reemerged in the form of a few screenshots of what the game could have been. Shared in the online portfolio of one of Everwild’s artists, the screenshots offer a brief glimpse of how the combat-free adventure game could have played, had its development not been one of the many victims of owner Microsoft’s frequent layoffs.
The screenshots were first spotted by MP1st, which does not share the images’ original source but says they come from “the website of an artist who worked on the game.” Multiple menu and inventory screens are shown in the images, but little else. Judging by what can be seen in the screens, though, it seems to be in line with what was previously known about Everwild — that it was developed as a non-violent game based around tending to plants and animals.
The new images seem to show Everwild in multiple stages of development, first with a more rudimentary user interface with some clear placeholders, and later with a more stylized and complete version. The player’s inventory shows a collection of seeds, along with Mosaics (which seem to be placable decorative elements, as the name implies, and Figments (some sort of plant-like creatures).
Even with this unearthed batch of screenshots, a lot of questions remain unanswered about Everwild. While decorating and tending to your own garden appear to be major elements of the game, trailers also showcased open-world exploration, with characters interacting with animals out in the wild. How that would have actually worked in the finished game is still unclear.
Whatever form Everwild would have taken in the end, it will no longer see the light of day, making the release of these new screenshots mostly an interesting oddity. It’s rare to see any part of canceled games be revealed to the public, thanks to the strict secrecy that accompanies most in-development games and non-disclosure agreements that typically prohibit artists from sharing even their own work.
Up until recently, it seemed that Everwild was in good shape. In February 2025, Xbox boss Phil Spencer commented on the project, indicating all was well.
“I was recently out at Rare,” Spencer told the XboxEra podcast at the time. “It’s nice to see the team with Everwild and the progress that they’re making.”
Since then, Microsoft has instituted a devastating wave of layoffs across its studios, costing around 9,000 people their jobs in July alone, Everwild’s developers among them. In addition to Everwild, Rare’s Perfect Dark was also canceled, with both games’ teams either being laid off or assigned to different projects.
The new screenshots of Everwild may not reveal much, but they’re a reminder of the costs of Microsoft’s consolidation strategy, which has seen it acquire then gut studio after studio in the past couple of years. Everwild almost seemed like it was set to become a niche title, something more on the scale of Rare’s Sea of Thieves than one of Xbox’s biggest crowd-pleasers. While that might have limited its potential audience, it was clearly aiming for something far different from the blockbusters Xbox seems more interested in pursuing. There’s of course no telling how well the game would have worked if it made it to release, but the landscape of gaming is clearly poorer for the loss of variety that comes from titles like it being canceled before release.
