Greetings!

Exciting news! Akatori: Chapter One is finally available!

We hope you enjoy playing. If you do, please consider wishlisting the full game!

Let's kick off our overview with (not so) fun fact #1: if you follow us on social media or occasionally engage with the game outside of Steam updates, you've probably noticed that this world is most often referred to as Void. That's because no one on the team bothers to memorize such a tricky word as Kohakujō, and everyone still uses its working title (even the writer, shame on them). But here's the funniest part: no one in the in-game universe calls it that either. Except for the inhabitants of the Land of the Emerald Peaks, one of whom you get to play as. So yeah, the more you know.

What essentially is Kohakujō? To avoid excessive lore dumping, let’s keep it relatively brief: Kohakujō is the very first ‘container’ world, the homeland of an ancient civilization of Gods, and the energetic core of the game universe, as well as the deposit of amber resin, a highly efficient energy resource (time for fun fact #2: its name literally means ‘amber citadel’ or ‘amber castle’ in Japanese. Or at least it should). Kohakujō organically provides all other worlds with basic energy, allowing them to sustain their livelihoods.

One of the very early concept arts. Yup, Akatori could be set in Silent Hill

Monks are convinced that the amber resin is the tears of Akatori the Firebird that gave birth to the universe. They also believe that one of the Bird's tears sprouted the Primordial Tree from which the Gods and then humans were first born. When Kohakujō became a bit crowded, the Gods began to create separate worlds for people and other races one by one (this is why the side realms have different ages and are at different stages of development), but after a while, the destructive behavior of mortals spawned Chaos, from which the Bird hid the Gods, and which plagues Kohakujō to this day. Phew, sorry, that was as brief as possible. So, did things really play out that way? Well, that's for you to find out in the full game.

That’s how Kohakujō looks today. What will it look like tomorrow? We’ll see, I guess

Since Kohakujō plays an important role in the story and is a border world that connects the entire multiverse of Akatori, we wanted to add more flavor to it with unique mechanics. In the current state of the game, the more time you spend in Kohakujō, the harder it gets to actually stay there: there’s a timer, aka the Chaos Meter, causing levels to change and hidden passages or hazards to appear. To reset the meter, you have to either save the game by resting at the altars or hit one of the special bells scattered across the world. But more challenges also mean more rewards, so it’s always a matter of whether a risk is worth taking at a given time.

The corruption mechanic is intentionally not explicit: the world around changes and makes the player going through the same level twice think 'wait, was it always like this here?'.

The real-life reference of the current Kohakujō design, presumably somewhere in California

In the future we plan to expand the mechanics further, not only in terms of environment but also enemies, and add a special boss that will chase the player when Chaos levels are high. We ultimately aim for more risk/reward situations, where high Chaos opens up new zones and shortcuts, but makes traveling through Kohakujō noticeably more difficult. Plus, we're considering introducing items that affect Chaos mechanics. For example, making the world corrupt faster if you want to artificially increase the difficulty.

Of course, in addition to the lore background and mechanics, we will also continue to work on the visual design of this world, where players will likely spend most of their time: improving existing art, adding clearer zoning, catchy landmarks, and so on. However, in such matters it's always better to show than to tell, so stay tuned for more updates.

Please remember to wishlist both Akatori and Chapter One if you’re looking forward to the game, this will help us immensely with upcoming releases.

Cheers!