BODY: A tank game where you're not allowed to shoot. A dress-sewing simulator that real apparel professionals say gets the details right. A desktop pet app pulling 30,000 concurrent players on a demo alone. Japanese gaming site AUTOMATON's weekly roundup of its seven most-read game features captures an indie scene running on very specific obsessions.
The headline release date belongs to We Were Here Tomorrow, the latest entry in Total Mayhem Games' long-running two-player puzzle series, arriving October 20 on Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S with cross-play planned. As ever, the hook is enforced communication: players are separated and can only coordinate through in-game transceivers, making the voice chat itself part of the puzzle design rather than a convenience layer.
The most-watched announcement, though, was Dawngazer (ドーンゲイザー), an action RPG from Ignis Phia Studio — a new outfit founded by Takashi Noma, a veteran of Vanillaware, the Osaka studio behind Odin Sphere and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. The project is being made with Good Smile Company, better known for Nendoroid figures, and is positioned as the first title in a wider "Ignisphia" fantasy brand. SLAM TANK went the opposite direction for attention: a tank battler with the guns effectively benched, built around spinning turret swipes, body checks, jumps, and tricks.
Rounding out the list were WonderPaws, a free-to-play online life sim set in a city shared by humans and anthropomorphic animals, where a drink lets you swap forms; Fish & Ships, a two-to-six player co-op adventure about fish crewing airships in search of their home sea; and Charaya (キャラ屋), a customizable desktop-pet app whose Steam demo hit roughly 30,000 concurrent users. Dressmaker, already out, covers design, cutting, and sewing in enough depth that people who do it for a living have taken notice.
The insider take
AUTOMATON's weekly picks are one of the more reliable barometers of what Japanese PC players are actually clicking on, and this week's spread is telling. Two of the seven — Charaya and Dressmaker — aren't games so much as toys and craft software, a category Japanese Steam users have embraced far more readily than Western charts suggest. Meanwhile the Dawngazer news follows a familiar Kansai pattern: a senior artist leaves an auteur studio, keeps the house visual language, and finds a partner with merch muscle. Good Smile's involvement signals this is being built as a character franchise first, game second.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).