BODY: Four children, spirited away into the dark. One demon hunting them. Thirty seconds left on the clock, and the demon is getting stronger.
Japanese developer FORCES released a new Steam demo on September 25 for Kakure-Oni: Hide-and-Seek Horror, an asymmetric multiplayer horror game in which five players split into two very unequal teams. The build is the same one shown at Tokyo Game Show 2026 in Makuhari, reworked with feedback gathered from earlier closed beta tests.
The setup draws on kamikakushi โ the old Japanese belief that children who vanish have been "hidden by the gods," the same folklore that gives Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away its Japanese title. Here, the vanished children must simply survive until the timer runs out. Their key tool is kagekakushi, or shadow concealment: stand still in darkness and your body turns transparent. The demo adds new movement options too, with crouching now snuffing out your flashlight and restoring stamina, while sliding lets you dive into cover in a hurry.
The lone demon player gets the oni no me, a "demon's eye" that reveals distant children and strips away their concealment at close range. Pressure builds as the match goes on: allied ghosts accumulate on the demon's side, and once the clock drops under 30 seconds, the demon's abilities sharpen considerably. It is a deliberate inversion of the usual asymmetric-horror arc, where survivors normally gain the upper hand late.
FORCES has not announced a release date or price. The game is currently PC-only via Steam.
The insider take
The name is a pun that English marketing will struggle with: oni is both the demon of Japanese folklore and the "it" player in onigokko, the tag game every Japanese child grows up playing. Kakure-oni is literally a real playground variant combining hide-and-seek with tag โ so the title lands for a Japanese audience as "that game you played at school, except the oni is an actual demon." Small studios like FORCES increasingly use TGS's indie floor as a live QA session, folding hands-on reactions straight into a public demo within days; it is a cheap, fast feedback loop that Japanese indies have gotten very good at, and it explains the unusually short turnaround between the show and this build.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net โ ๆๆฐ่จไบ (Japanese).