How Unseen’s debut is taking urban fantasy action to the spirit level

By Alan Wen

When we visited Ikumi Nakamura in E394, it was just prior to her appearance to officially announce Kemuri at the Game Awards in Los Angeles, a high-profile event of a similar stature to the one that catapulted her into the public limelight at Bethesda’s E3 presentation in 2019. A lot changed between those two appearances. No longer under a big publisher’s yoke, today she is her own boss at Unseen Inc. While the studio is based in Tokyo, its staff, up from 50 to 60 people since we previously visited, are located across the globe. The cross-region, remote-driven approach to game development is the picture of modernity, but the group’s debut project sees Nakamura looking into the past.

Kemuri is an action game combining the kind of freewheeling urban parkour traversal seen in Infamous: Second Son alongside the effortless verticality of Monster Hunter Rise, where interactions with otherworldly beings, yokai, give the impression of a grown-up version of Yokai Watch. For Nakamura, the concept had been “brewing in my mind since my middle-school days.” It’s a world where humans and yokai exist in the same space, inspired by the supernatural manga she devoured in her youth, including YuYu Hakusho and Ghost Sweeper Mikami. The genre remains a Japanese pop-culture mainstay today thanks to series such as Jujutsu Kaisen, one of the best-selling manga properties of all time. “I’ve always been interested in the unknown – things you can’t normally see, things that are hidden – and learning about what’s behind the curtain,” Nakamura says. Viewed through this lens, the studio’s name comes into clearer focus, as do the hand signs seen in the illustrations of Nakamura and her colleagues that feature within these pages. The shapes vary – there are circles, triangles, and more – but they all form a frame around an eye. The most recognisable variation is the frame you might make when composing a shot in photography. All can be used to create what is referred to in Japanese culture as a ‘fox window’.

Game Kemuri Developer Unseen Inc Publisher TBA Format PC and console (TBA) Origin Japan Release TBA

“There’s this game, or little legend, where if you put your fingers together in a certain shape and you look through them, you can see things that are normally invisible,” Nakamura explains. When she was a child, Nakamura’s grandmother told her that she would make such a window with her hands while her husband was away at war: the process reassured her that he was still alive because she did not see his figure in the frame, meaning that he had not departed from this world. “That story stuck with me,” Nakamura says. “And so, inspired by that legend, we put it in our game where the player uses [the fox window] to reveal things and interact with that other side.”

It’s that same childlike curiosity Nakamura wishes to instil in players, contrasting with the “boring adults” who have lost the drive to explore the unknown or even what might lie off the beaten path in the neighbourhoods around them. Kemuri is not just the name of the game’s fictional city – it also means ‘smoke’ in Japanese, conjuring both the mystical kind emitted from incense and also what this world’s yokai are formed from. It’s the first hint that your yokai hunter has of their presence. Confronting them, however, requires exposing them first. Holding the left trigger, it’s akin to aiming down sights, except that, rather than gun crosshairs, your hunter’s hands create a fox window. To our surprise, the yokai revealed before us in our demo aren’t of Japanese origin, despite the term typically referring to spirits from Japanese folklore. Instead, the figures that materialise are jiangshi, also known as hopping vampires, from Chinese folklore, recognisable by their black Qing dynasty garments. “They were one of the first enemies we made,” lead game designer Kenan Alpay says.

The surprise is intentional. Nakamura may have nursed the idea in her head for decades, but in building a distinctly international team – a few joining her from former employer Tango Gameworks but also including veteran talents from Ubisoft, Insomniac and Capcom – she wants Kemuri to incorporate influences from across countries and cultures. “I believe Kemuri is a game that only a team like Unseen can make,” she says. There is an emphasis on the word ‘team’, the creative director determined to avoid creating a perception of auteurism, a term that might be ascribed to some of the developers she has worked alongside previously. With Kemuri, she encourages other members of Unseen to take the lead in opening our eyes to the game.