WOW will be presenting the first public playtest of its upcoming game “NOWHERE UMBRELLA” at BitSummit PUNCH, Japan’s largest indie game festival, held at Miyako Messe in Kyoto from May 22. The glow of skyscrapers wrapped in the darkness of night. Neon signs lining the streets, the sweep of headlights from passing cars. Amid fragments of a city emerging from the dark like scattered starlight, a single vinyl umbrella drifts through the air—ownerless, directionless. An umbrella that will be forgotten the moment the rain stops; the kind found abandoned on any street corner. Yet once its owner has gone, released into the shimmering fragments of the city, something about its journey draws the player to follow where it leads— Players control the vinyl umbrella as it moves through the city at night. There is no score to chase, no puzzle to solve. The only rule in “NOWHERE UMBRELLA” is to read the fragments of the urban environment and navigate through obstacles. Those obstacles take the form of motifs drawn from the city itself—the sequence of colors in a traffic signal, the patterns of illuminated windows across a building facade—rendered in abstraction before the player’s eyes. From the behavior of light and its relationship to the surrounding space, players intuitively reconstruct the contours of each obstacle and discover passages through them. In this game, perception itself becomes the interface. The concept for “NOWHERE UMBRELLA” traces its roots to “Tokyo Light Odyssey,” a 360° video work released by WOW in 2016—a landmark year in the emergence of consumer VR. Born from an internal WOW project exploring new possibilities in motion graphics, the work offered a fresh approach to visual expression through immersive 360° VR imagery. Its world, composed of familiar fragments of Tokyo—convenience store signage glowing in the dark, station neon reflected in wet pavement—has, over the course of a decade, evolved into the playable experience of “NOWHERE UMBRELLA.” For WOW—a studio that has long interrogated the depths of visual experience through film and installation—the medium of games represents a new expressive frontier: one that transforms the act of spectatorship into something more active and participatory. By designing visual beauty not merely as an aesthetic, but rather as a functional element of the game itself, WOW explores a form of play that merges cognitive science and visual expression with game mechanics—a distinctly original approach rooted in its identity as a visual design studio. WOW’s appearance at BitSummit marks the first public playtest of this game in development. WOW looks forward to hearing feedback from visitors and to meeting new supporters and potential collaborators. Come experience firsthand the kind of visual world WOW brings to the indie game space.

Loading...

BitSummit PUNCH Event Details Dates: Friday, May 22-Sunday, May 24, 2026 　May 22 is a Business Day (industry professionals only) Hours: 10:00-17:00 Venue: Miyako Messe (Kyoto Municipal Museum of Industrial Technology) Exhibition Hall 2 Address: 9-1, Okazaki Seishojicho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto-shi WOW Booth: 3F A-07 About BitSummit BitSummit is Japan’s largest indie game festival, held annually in Kyoto. It was founded in the latter half of 2012 with the aim of bringing exciting Japanese indie games to an international audience. The inaugural event in 2013 was a small industry gathering that attracted around 200 attendees; by BitSummit the 13th (2025), cumulative attendance had reached a record high of 58,065. The festival continues to grow as one of the most significant indie game festivals. ▶BitSummit