It hasn't been abandoned. It's F95 policy to tag a game as "Abandoned" if it doesn’t receive any update in several months. The game is on hold due to my hard drive's unfortunate demise.I'll reserve judgement until after this game receives a few updates. I remember how the dev used to get defensive when people pointed out that the previous game was getting too convoluted, and lo and behold, it's now abandoned. The easier thing to do would've been to restructure the plot and use the same renders, and then continue the story from there.
I think a lot of people share my skepticism about how this one will turn out but we'll see.
I'm recreating the characters again. Once they are created, I'll start start working on the 10th version of the game.