Yoshiro Kimura's new sandbox RPG will be out in 2023, might be about "children"

Yoshiro Kimura and his studio, Onion Games, are known for being off-beat. They make games that go in hard on their own strange internal worlds, wrapping up a particular sense of passion and energy in earnestly oddball humour. Undertale makes for a handy comparison - which makes sense, because many of the team worked on Moon, one of the games that inspired it.

I'm telling you all this because it might pique your interest in their upcoming sandbox RPG, which we now know will be out at some point next year.

We don't know much else, but what we do know comes from the latest edition of Onion Games' newsletter, where Kimura responds to a few fan questions. "Next year is all we can say for now", he said, in response to someone asking when the next game will be out. "In order to announce a release date", he expanded, "we have to be at a point in development where we know we can absolutely keep that date... and we're not there yet".

He extends a similar, appropriately videogame uncle-ish vagueness to someone who asks what the game will be about, responding that he can't give a definitive answer because he's been trying to fully understand that himself "while he makes it". The best we get is this: "What I can say is that this time, I have been thinking a lot about "children"."

A few more hints appear on the game's announcement page from back in December 2020, where Kimura states that "This world if full of irrational events" and asks "can children ever hope to overcome this irrationality which adults have left unresolved?". "In bringing back the romantic, fairytale nature of RPGS", he says, "I want to discover my own answer to this question."

He also mentions this will be his last RPG, seeing this as his last chance to drum up the required stamina.

We'll find out what all that means at some point next year, though in the meantime you can currently buy all of Onion Games' games for 30% off on Steam.