// KOTAKU — GAMING
Japanese Indie Gaming Publishers Are Doing Things Differently
Tokyo Game Show 2026 was light on major upcoming releases, in part due to a quieter-than-normal fall for gaming outside of the unavoidable spectre of Grand Theft Auto VI. That being said, there were still things to see at this year’s event—you just had to know where to look. Take a glance at the world of Japanese indie gaming showcased on the convention floor, for example, and you would find a wonderful assortment of unique experiences rooted in Japanese social issues and experiences, the results of a notable divergence from how Japanese indie games have historically been developed, supported, and shared with players.
It may be somewhat surprising that it’s taken until the last few years for a groundswell of Japanese indie developers to establish themselves within the domestic games industry. Indie gaming has thrived since the late 2000s outside of Japan thanks to digital storefronts on consoles, and Japan itself is host to events like Comiket, where both amateur original and derivative works in various art forms, including video games, can be sold. These works are known as doujin.
At their core, doujin games were acts of love created by hobbyist developers to sell to core fans, whether original or derivative of another IP. The Touhou franchise, arguably the biggest example of Japanese independent gaming media in the past 30 years, rose from this subculture. Otherwise, however, doujin has been mostly a passion-fueled endeavor, a way to share creations with like-minded fans more than a path to profit or a potential career.
Yet as global indie darlings like Undertale, sustained marketing efforts like Nintendo’s Indie World, and Japanese indie companies like Q-Games and Orbitals developer Shapefarm find success, some have felt encouraged to break from the norm of major company employment and challenge themselves to give indie game development a shot. With more teams and creators embracing this field, the results are often unique experiences that channel Japanese societal practices and personal experiences.
Mask It, featured at Tokyo Game Show this year as part of the Selected Indie 80, a program designed to bring attention to standout indie efforts, began as a Game Jam project during this year’s Global Game Jam. Players assume the role of a news editor whose job is to make the everyday news more “exciting” to hit targets and please editors, often by deliberately blurring over photographs or making other edits in stories as you seek sensationalistic virality. These tweaks could merely be done for comedic effect, or to insinuate sinister implications and have a corrosive impact on public discourse or opinion, making the game a reflection of increasing concerns in Japan over the spread of false information on social media and by politicians, alongside concerns about AI.
Timemoon, from developer Kenkou Land, is a narrative adventure in which you play as Clark, a taxi driver in the near future taking passengers in his time-traveling taxi. A passenger’s destination may not just be a location but a moment in time, and following the mysterious death of the president, your chauffeuring of high-profile passengers may be key to understanding the possible use of time travel in their murder.
Then you have Late Fee Girls, an RPG following three girls who run a video store and make secondary revenue as Exorcist Streamers, going out to fight ghosts from haunted videotapes. It’s an ambitious project for solo developer Urimo, who is concurrently selling doujin comics that contain character sketches and in-universe commentary from the characters as development continues.
There were plenty of other exciting indie games at TGS this year, too, like Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, which features a bicycling tanuki running errands and pulling tricks like Tony Hawk, and Iron Bramble, a Metroidvania with a unique grappling hook–driven movement system. But it’s the doujin magazines of Late Fee Girls that reveal, on a more intimate scale, how Japanese doujin a