BODY: The star of System 3's Tokyo Game Show 2026 booth was not a soldier, a samurai, or a mech. It was a blue blob who pulls faces when you stretch him — and, by GAME Watch's account, the face-pulling is the best part.
Putty World: 35th Anniversary is coming to Nintendo Switch 2 in the second quarter of 2027, marking 35 years since the original Putty squelched onto home computers in 1992. The hook has not changed: you play a sentient lump of putty who stretches, flattens, inflates and absorbs his way through side-scrolling stages, solving problems with elasticity rather than a sword.
What struck GAME Watch's reporter in the hands-on was the coexistence of two eras. The underlying movement retains a distinctly 90s tezawari — that word Japanese games writers reach for when they mean the physical "feel" in your hands — chunky, weighty, occasionally unforgiving in the way pre-checkpoint platformers were. Layered on top is thoroughly modern presentation: fluid deformation animation and a wide range of facial expressions that sell Putty as a character rather than a sprite. The reaction shots, the report notes, are genuinely charming.
The coverage also includes an interview with System 3's CEO, the veteran British publisher having kept the Putty and Last Ninja catalogue alive across four decades of hardware transitions.
The insider take
System 3 showing up at Makuhari Messe with a 35-year-old European platformer is less quixotic than it sounds. Japan is the one market where Putty has real, if quiet, nostalgia equity — the Super Famicom-era release gave the character a foothold here that he never quite had in Europe. And Switch 2's install base skews toward exactly the demographic that remembers him. Retro revivals from Western studios have historically bounced off Japanese storefronts; leading with cuteness and expression work, rather than with difficulty or heritage, is a smart read of what actually moves units here.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).