Indie games represent a wonderful world of unique experiences, but sometimes can be overshadowed by the big blockbusters of AAA gaming. Thankfully, independent projects are still able to find an audience and have a presence at events like Tokyo Game Show. A company in the space that I had the chance to meet with at this year’s TGS is Red Dune Games, which co-develops and publishes indie titles. At their booth, Red Dune Games was showcasing a number of upcoming games, providing a space for these smaller projects to get the discovery and attention they deserve.
The first game at the Red Dune Games booth I demoed was Nightmare Circus. It’s being developed by FairPlay Studios, which is based in Bangkok, Thailand. In this action-adventure game, you play as a cute puppeteer who has become trapped in the Nightmare Realm, a whimsically dark circus-themed world. The puppeteer can fight with normal hand-to-hand combat but his most powerful abilities come from using his string-equipped x-shaped puppet stick.
With the puppet stick, you can defeat enemies in various ways using the puppet string. Wrapping the puppet string around enemies then pulling the string, clashing them together is a great way to defeat multiple bad guys quickly. You can also pull enemies closer to you or into falling into holes with the puppet string, or launching the puppeteer into a headbutt attack. Additionally, your puppet string is used to solve puzzles and for traversal, too, like to grapple and zip across holes and trenches.
Nightmare Circus’ art style was equally charming, with a simple yet cute fanfare aesthetic. It’s a visual style that feels reminiscent of the LittleBigPlanet games or The Amazing Digital Circus web series. Coupled with game mechanics that is honestly a lot of fun, I discovered myself wanting to continue playing while I demoed it. The gameplay would lend itself to a co-op adventure experience well in my opinion, so I’d love to see the developers try their hand at that in an update, expansion, or sequel. Nightmare Circus releases sometime in 2026 for PS5 and other platforms as well.
Speaking of co-op games, the other Red Dune Games title I demoed was LightSup! This one is a co-op beat ‘em up being developed by BugBlio Studio, another independent developer based in Thailand. You can play this fantasy adventure with up to four players, with local couch co-op supported (you love to see that). Together, your heroes defeat enemies in randomly generated battles and paths to save Lumineia Kingdom.
In LightSup!, there are a number of characters to choose from, each with their own abilities so it’s essentially like selecting a class to play as. You’ve got a lot of your classic fantasy story archetypes including the sword-wielding fighter, magic spell-casting mage, and the benevolent healer. With this class variety, cooperation ends up being key to surviving. While I played, I had another human player with me and it was a lot of help as we progressed through areas.
I found LightSup! to be an enjoyable co-op game that’s easy enough to pick up and play that I can imagine it wouldn’t be hard to get your less gamer friends to join in. The 2D art style is very colorful and expressive and really reminded me of the 00s and 10s era of animation and flash games, especially on Newgrounds. The randomly generated nature of the battles and journey paths probably should add nice replayability as well, so no playthrough will be alike. LightSup! Is looking to launch at some point next year.
Red Dune Games’ most buzzed about upcoming release has to be Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast from the Past! I’m a lifelong anime fan, with Samurai Pizza Cats being one of my first anime ever, so this is a project I’m looking forward to. The Samurai Pizza Cats game is an action-RPG being developed by Netherlands-based studio Blast Zero, which previously made the game Jitsu Squad.
The game is looking to capture the 2D hand-drawn animation style and anime look of the series. I was told the development team has been working with Tatsunoko Production, the studio behind the original Samurai Pizza Cats anime, on the game. While not available to demo, there was various materials on display including artwork. Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast from the Past! will also launch in 2026.
Thank you to Red Dune Games for having me at Tokyo Game Show 2025. All demos were played on PC hardware with a PS5 DualSense controller.