Ikumi Nakamura’s Kemuri Is Online PvE With A 2000s Anime Aesthetic

Ikumi Nakamura’s Unseen Studio has finally shared their first major preview for upcoming title Kemuri.

For those who need a quick refresher, Ikumi Nakamura was that charming Japanese game developer who won fans over all the way back for her appearance in E3 2019. While most fans of her then still don’t know about her industry bona fides, they are impressive.

She has been working in the industry since 2004, starting out as an artist for Capcom on titles like Okami. She also had long tenures at PlatinumGames and Tango Gameworks, working on titles like Bayonetta and Ghostwire Tokyo, before striking out onto her own in 2021 by starting her own game studio, Unseen. Kemuri will be Unseen’s first release.

So, Kemuri is a supernatural online action cooperative PvE game with a yokai, modern city theme, that still looks mostly like a neo-Tokyo. The yokai theme isn’t particularly novel, but Unseen’s take is stylish and attention grabbing. Video games with yokai themes vary from Cosmology of Kyoto, to, of course, Yo-kai Watch.

Unseen’s take makes us play as yokai hunters, who spot yokai in the middle of Tokyo by opening a yokai window (by motioning to form a square in front of their eyes). However, when we open yokai windows, yokai can spot us too. So, we have to use strategy in finding the right time and location to do so.

Players can fight with yokai, but also negotiate with them and even collect them. This will definitely sound like a Persona game, but lest we forget, Kemuri is PvE action, where you can play alone, or find friends, or even go onto a lobby online to join you in fighting yokai.

Another striking element of Kemuri’s visual aesthetic is the movement. While Unseen’s developers seem to use abstract language in describing it, we can say that they deliberately chose not to use motion capture. That is the industry practice that gets all AAA CG games to have the same hyperrealistic look to character models, but often have them looking and moving stiff.

Unseen explains they focused on the keyframes for animation instead of using motion capture. Keyframes are the static drawings that define the starting and ending points of animation. So what they are saying is they focused on traditional animation techniques, that lends itself to creating the illusion of fluid movement.

Kemuri will have vertical level design, and demonstrated a few ways to rise to the tops of buildings across their neo-Tokyo. That includes running up walls, using a grappling hook, and even skating on electric wires, which may or may not have been an idea borrowed from a bunch of squids, or even a lombax.

Unseen isn’t quite ready to show us gameplay, but Kemuri already has a very strong game concept as it is. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing this title’s eventual release, but it looks like it may take some time before we get there.

In the meantime, you can see Unseen’s preview video below.