Sai No Kawara But Make It Y2K

Kodansha is a Tokyo-based megapublisher behind music releases, literary magazines, and tons of manga, including Weekly Shōnen Magazine, which has been running since 1959. But as of 2020, Kodansha, like other companies more famous for publishing periodicals like manga and the like, launched an indie game division. Since then, Yuki Katayama, the general chief of Kodansha Game Creators Lab, has focused on finding creators with unique ideas for the indie game space. “We don’t aim for a specific genre or a specific type of game,” he tells me on the show floor of Tokyo Game Show. “We look for unique creators.”

Kenkoh-Kikoh is the indie studio founded by Japanese artist Shinobu Shishikura, and it’s the developer behind Children’s Garden, one of the most unique games I play at the show. Katayama shows me the PC where I am to play Children’s Garden. It’s based on a tale centered on children who die young and drift to a riverbank where they suffer – they stack towers of stones and demons continuously knock them down. Curiously, there is only a mouse; no keyboard. 

Y2K visuals light up the screen, with a gummy UI that looks both edible and reminiscent of the early 2000s computer games I played in my PC elementary school resource class. A young child even speaks to me in the bottom right corner, begging me to stack stones to complete puzzles and extend his lifespan in his next life.