The irony of keeping this personal blog is that I feel weird about promoting my work on here! But to be brief: we finally reached the milestone of announcing the new game we’ve been working on these past couple of years:

Neo Harbor Rescue Squad lets you live the life of a rookie paramedic through frantic minigame action and a wild, funny story. Juggle waves of patients with a battle-like triage system; master dozens of treatment minigames; and win the city’s recognition from the rival fire department in this paramedic action drama!

As we finish the game (for PS5, PS4, and Steam), we’re also spending a lot of timing banging the drum to try to build awareness for it — which, as you can imagine, is no small feat in the social media landscape of 2024.

Will Neo Harbor Rescue Squad find the audience we think is out there for it? We won’t know until we launch: until then, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

You can wishlist the game on Steam and see the official site here.

We just updated our company blog with a new post detailing our recent trip to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. It was our 11th (!) time at the show — we went to show off our game behind closed doors, meet industry partners, and make plans for the next project.

We have lots of thoughts and feelings, and a few good photos, to share about the experience.

It appears that mangaka Inio Asano is referencing 1996 PS1 horror game Twilight Syndrome in his new series, Mujina into the Deep.

Twilight Syndrome is a side-scrolling horror title that mixes 2D, animated sprites with 3D environments to tell fairly linear, spooky tales. In it, three classmates sneak into their high school to investigate various urban legends and ghost stories.

I played this game back in college as far as I could in Japanese (I didn’t know any then) with my wife (then girlfriend), who could read the game’s kanji. Its earliest chapter features a scary ghost girl and a bathroom, which is a standard Japanese horror trope.

It scared the absolute shit out of me.

That game was stuck in my mind for years and would form the base inspiration for our first (and still most popular!) commercial game, Home. After playing that PS1 disc, I couldn’t get the idea of 2D, side-scrolling horror games out of my mind!

I love stories about scary things hiding amongst everyday places like schools and offices; about urban legends, local tales, and things just lurking around the corner that are better left forgotten.

In high school, I wrote a very cheesy novella that was, essentially, Twilight Syndrome — except in my overwrought story, it was also a clumsy teenage romance. (The loss of any backup or copy of this early foray into writing is a deep wound, let me tell you.) So when I discovered this game, it was like fate.

Twilight Syndrome’s developer, Human Entertainment, also holds a special place in my heart. They were a constantly-evolving Japanese studio that produced many hidden gems and concepts that have often gone overlooked. Sadly, they are no longer around as a studio, but their DNA can be felt throughout the industry if you’re paying attention.

And, clearly, Inio Asano is a fan as well, because who would reference such an obscure PS1 horror game in 2024?