If the current trend of AI-generated Studio Ghibli memes is leaving a bad taste, then take comfort in Tanuki: Pon's Summer, a cosy-looking indie game (albeit with a cheeky BMX-ing tanuki), which you might assume has Ghibli vibes just because of its setting in the Japanese countryside and anime aesthetic, but certainly isn't ripping off the beloved animation studio.
Instead, Tanuki: Pon's Summer is a game that has not only been created in collaboration with other talented Japanese artists but also takes its inspirations directly from the country itself (developer DenkiWorks is based in Kyoto).
"We're super lucky that we live in Japan," says co-founder and game director Liam Edwards. "We don't need any reference point from any other media, we don't need to look at other games or anime, we just look outside and we take lots of photos."
Kyoto itself, besides being Japan's former capital and the home of Nintendo, is also best known for its huge festival (or matsuri) in the summer, although he tells me that the inspiration for Tanuki, where you play as the titular character trying to repair the village's shrine in time over the course of a month, had come from his own firsthand experience of matsuri when he first lived in Japan in the countryside near a smaller city called Okayama.
Infused with Japanese culture
"There's maybe only one konbini and everybody knows each other, so when I was teaching English, everybody would know who the English teacher was, which was really nice, but kind of scary being known as the only foreigner in the village," Liam explains.
Despite being an outsider, Liam found that he was nonetheless always invited to be part of the community's activities, the biggest being the summer matsuri, which brings the whole community together.
"So when it came to designing Tanuki, having this shrine that is at the centre and having the whole town pull together to make this matsuri happen just made so much sense and has evolved to mean more to me over time," reflects Liam.
That's partly the reason behind you playing as an adorable anthropomorphised animal. While tanuki are a species of raccoon native to Japan, being the only animal in the game is an intentional allegory for being the fish out of water. It's why Pon doesn't actually speak to the human characters and instead uses emojis.
"I see it as a way of trying to show in a fun way what it can be like to be different, but you're still accepted and everyone's trying to work to communicate with you, even if it's not necessarily always the smoothest of experiences," Liam explains.
Anime character design
There's just as much charm in the locals that you help out and vice versa, which are very much inspired from classic manga tropes, and which the studio actually collaborated with a Japanese artist called Mongy.
"We wanted normal characters with small memorable details about them, and one of the best artists for that is Eiichiro Oda (creator of One Piece)," Liam says. "So we found Mongy, who had the ability to understand that kind of simplicity. We worked with him to define our whole character list because he was just so good at faces and remarkable shapes."
When it came to creating the tones of a rural Japanese summer, the inspiration actually came from photography, or rather anime-inspired photography. Specifically, Liam had found a book by Japanese photographer Akine Coco called 'Like a Scene from an Anime', which contains hundreds of her photographs of scenery that look as if they're lifted from a Ghibli film.
"In the summer, Japan has a distinctive colour palette of very striking green and blue hues with very dry yellows, but these photos are just lightly colour-graded to have a more anime hue," Liam explains. "This became the foundation for us to build our art style, taking the real nature of Japan and then saturating the colours a little bit to make it look more anime colour-graded."
Tanuki is also DenkiWorks' debut game, and for Liam, a step up to 3D after his previous 2D physics-based golfing roguelike Cursed to Golf. While the small studio has been using Unity, he says the engine is more of a blank canvas while they have had to build a lot of their own custom tools. "We've had to be very custom in the way we design everything, whether it's cutscene managing, quest building, or how we build our environments," he says.
There are long-term benefits though because he explains these tools can then be built upon for future projects, citing Supergiant Games as one such example.
We've had to be very custom in the way we design everything, whether it's cutscene managing, quest building, or how we build our environments
Liam Edwards, co-founder, Denkiworks
"You don't go straight to making Hades, you make Bastion first and then the tools you make Bastion, you make the next subsequent games, then the building of those games over that time leads you into that further success," Liam concludes.
He adds: "Even though I believe Tanuki will be a great game, I think our fifth game down the line will be even better because of the building blocks put in place before it."
Tanuki: Pon's Summer is set to release in late 2025 for PC, Xbox Series X/S (including day one on Xbox Game Pass), and Nintendo Switch. If you're inspired to create your own game, read our guide to the best game development software and catch up on the latest drawing tablet tech.
