BODY: Most action games are built around going up. Cygames' newest one is built entirely around falling — and making peace with it.
Hōraku no Kuni ("Land of Collapse") launched today, November 5, on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and Steam for ¥1,100 (roughly $7). Cygames bills it as a "dramatic collapse action adventure," and the descent is both the mechanic and the story: a man who has lost everything meets a child branded as cursed, and the two climb down a vast world tree toward the surface.
The central mechanic is Flower Dive. Mid-plunge, your character throws a flower bud that blooms into a landing pad, converting a fatal drop into a survivable one — if you time the throw right. Everything around it is tuned to make that moment tense: gusting wind, crumbling footholds, and stingily placed safe zones. Cygames says the goal was to preserve "human weight and gravity" rather than let players float through levels, so each descent feels committed rather than forgiving.
The main story runs about three hours, with high-difficulty maps and time-attack modes unlocking afterward for players who want to optimize routes and shave seconds. It's a deliberately compact package at a deliberately compact price.
The bigger news may be the label on the box. Hōraku no Kuni is the first release under CygamesEdge, a new Cygames brand dedicated to small- and mid-scale titles.
The insider take
For a Shibuya company best known for ¥10-billion-scale mobile properties — Uma Musume, Granblue Fantasy, Shadowverse — launching a ¥1,100 three-hour game under a brand-new label is a genuine strategic signal, not a side project. Japanese publishers have watched the domestic indie scene (Dave the Diver-style breakouts, Bitsummit's growing clout) produce outsized returns on modest budgets, and major studios have been quietly building internal pipelines to compete there. Treating Switch 2 as a day-one platform for a ¥1,100 download is the other tell: Cygames is betting the new hardware's eShop becomes the discovery engine the original Switch was for small premium titles. Watch what CygamesEdge ships second — that will say whether this is a lab or a line of business.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).