Planned Release Date: Q1 2027

About This Game

Paint to fight

You are Sumi, a drop of ink with a brush for a tail. Wherever you move, you leave a stroke of wet ink – close it into a circle around the yokai and they are sealed. Every circle is judged: rough, fine or a perfect ensō. A perfect ensō rings the temple bell, triples your score and breaks even the toughest spirits.

But ink dries. Paper cranes, lantern fire, crows and lightning cut your stroke – dash through danger, nothing can touch you mid-flick.

A story told in picture scrolls

The old painter Bokusai sealed every spirit of the land in his great scroll – until one night his last circle stayed open. You are the last drop of his ink. Every great spirit speaks in haiku and gives back a memory of his life, painted live as an emaki. What you learn decides how it ends: close the last circle, or leave it open.

Walk the painted world

• Twelve worlds on a map you walk freely – a bamboo grove, a night festival, the palace of the moon, a spider castle, hot springs where Orochi sleeps and the underworld of Yomi.
  
• Every scroll its own trick – festival lanterns that burst into fireworks, a moon pond that mirrors your circles, bamboo that falls on the yokai, waves that wash your ink away.
  
• Twelve great spirits, from the Drumming Tanuki to Yamata no Orochi and its eight heads – and the Shadow of the Brush at the end of the journey.
  
• 31 kinds of yokai from Japanese folklore. Every one you seal goes into the bestiary with its story.
  
• The painter's temple opens hall by hall: the Shrine of Ink, new brush spirits, lasting techniques and a gallery of your runs.

More ways to play

• Pilgrimage – a roguelike run through all five scrolls: a technique card after every wave, roadside shrines, fortunes, master strokes and five dan ranks to climb on the leaderboard.
  
• Night Parade – the hundred demons march through your scroll. Survive until dawn while your techniques fire on their own, and close your stroke around the parade to seal them all at once.
  
• Zen garden – no harm, no hurry, only the brush.

• Four difficulties, from Gentle to Ichigo Ichie – one drop of ink, one chance
  
• Your run as a time-lapse painting, saved to your gallery
  
• 8 inks to unlock, from sumi black to shu red
  
• Accessibility: gentle closing, reduced motion, high contrast
  
• Mouse, keyboard or controller

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Story text, haiku, store texts and the German translation were written with the help of an AI assistant and reviewed by the developer. All art, the brush font, the music and every sound effect are generated procedurally by the game's own code - no AI image or audio models were used. Nothing is generated by AI during gameplay.