It’s summer in Kyoto again, and that means the return of two things – weather that’s officially hotter than the sun, and BitSummit.
For the uninitiated, BitSummit is Japan’s leading indie game festival, taking place at Kyoto’s Miyako Messe convention centre for a few days every year.
This is the show’s 13th year and once again VGC is its Western media partner, so I’ve braved the Kyoto heat (and a lot of rain too, for what it’s worth) to check out this year’s helping of indie games from around the world.
One of the best things about BitSummit is the show’s laidback vibe, especially on the first day. Taking place over a Friday-Sunday period, the Friday is a business day mainly attended by exhibitors, sponsors, media and various other members of the games industry.
While BitSummit takes place in a large enough venue and has a wide enough selection that it never even feels crowded on the public days – not to mention the fact that the general polite nature of Japanese people means the show is refreshingly light on influencers jumping around with cameras and other shenanigans – business day is nevertheless a nice way to try out as much as possible.
On Friday, even the most popular booths (such as PlayStation [10,892 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/platforms/playstation/”>PlayStation’s indie selection) offer pretty small queues, while many others can simply be approached and played right away. I’ve found this makes it the best day for stumbling upon curiosities that I’d never heard of before but immediately catch my attention.
It’s also the perfect opportunity to catch up with old friends.This is the best way I can describe Thumbylina, which in a show full of ‘smaller’ games was the smallest – quite literally – by a large margin. Developer Leona Takahashi’s booth at first appears to be showing absolutely nothing, but it’s only when you get right up to it that you notice the tiny Game Boy-like device sitting there.
This is the Thumby, a tiny open-source keychain which was originally Kickstarted a couple of years ago. Takahashi has created Thumbylina, which he claims to be the world’s smallest virtual girl. It’s seemingly above board, especially because with a screen this small – my thumbnail is bigger than it – it’s not like it could have handled smut even if it wanted to.
The idea is that players can take Thumbylina anywhere they want, and when they’re studying or exercising, they can set a timer during which she’ll do the same. Over time she’ll gain experience, unlocking new outfits and the like. Although it’s currently being developed for the Thumby, Takahashi told me he plans to release Thumbylina on a separate tiny keychain device and sell them as standalone products (presumably with a name-change to avoid issues).
Of course, not everything on show at BitSummit is quite as eccentric as a centimetre-tall lady friend. There’s more conventional indie fare there too, with one of the highlights on show at Nintendo’s own Indie World booth.
Last year Japanese developer Tecopark released Pico Park 2, a fun co-op multiplayer puzzle game on PC [11,282 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/platforms/pc/”>PC and ■ PICO PARK２ + MOUSE STAGE ■
「PICO PARK 2」は「pic.twitter.com/k0qRT5WsHJ
— PICO PARK / ピコパーク (@picoparkgame) June 24, 2025
You can’t have indie games without horror, but anyone who’s dabbled with the genre will know there’s a lot of unimaginative jump-scare rubbish out there. I’ve already written about the steps Steam [2,526 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/platforms/pc/steam/”>Steam it’s still very much under the vast majority of radars. It doesn’t deserve to be – a lot of indie games try too hard to be funny and fall painfully flat, but this had me laughing out loud numerous times throughout the demo.
You play as Muffles, the latest inmate in a mysterious prison. You have no idea why you’re there, nor do you know why your face has been ripped off. This gruesome concept leads to a hilarious situation where each NPC conversation has you choosing from a selection of well thought-out responses, all of which come out as “mmmmph mmm-mpph”, which leads to a variety of reactions from said NPC (“ah, the quiet type, eh”). The first episode is free on Steam now – I highly recommend giving it a go if you fancy something darkly comic.
I tried a couple of other Black Lantern Collective games, each of which was also interesting. No Players Online is the latest example of an ever-growing subgenre of what can only be described as ‘fake operating systems’, where players are faced with a stranger’s pretend old-school Windows 95 style front end and have to explore their computer. In this case, doing so eventually leads to the discovery of an old beta for an online FPS which, naturally, is now so old that nobody’s playing it, meaning you’re just running around its Capture the Flag map on your own. Until you’re not.
I also tried the brief prologue for Soviet Spooky Tales: Green Eyes, a visual novel set in the 1980s Soviet Union. Putting aside the obvious potential issues of supporting a project that was developed in Russia, the game itself tells a fun story – if a barely interactive one, based on the prologue – about a girl who buys a mysterious vinyl record which ends up playing a Ring-like message, leading to a gruesome stranger appearing at her front door.
This was just a selection of some of the more memorable titles I played during BitSummit’s first day. I’ll have further coverage on Saturday and Sunday, as well as an article on VGC’s Game of the Show, followed by a more detailed round-up of everything I played on the VGC Patreon page early next week.
Tomorrow, among other things, expect hands-on impressions of a curious Chinese FMV game, an intriguing origami-themed platformer, and a visual novel that reveals what happens after the moon lands on Earth.
