Denkiworks’ debut game, Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, puts players in control of an adorable but irresponsible tanuki called Pon in a stunning, Japan-inspired setting. The BMX-filled adventure follows a mammal paying the price for years of bad behaviour, with all the charm of a slice-of-life comedy and plenty of side activities along the way.
A freeloading tanuki, mounting debt, and a town full of possibilities will sound familiar to fans of . Alas, while you won’t find accountability from Tom Nook, Kyoto-based studio Denkiworks has stepped in to heal your financial trauma with a BMX-filled adventure in which a mammal finally pays the price for their years of bad behaviour.
“Even Japanese people ask why it’s a tanuki,” jokes Liam Edwards, a game designer at Denkiworks. “They have such a mythological background to them; they’re almost like dragons in terms of their mythology.”
In Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, you play as an adorable but irresponsible critter named Pon, who’s bled the coffers of the local shrine – his home – dry by buying video games and snack food instead of preparing for its semicentennial matsuri. As a result, the shrine is in total disrepair, and important architecture and cultural artefacts – such as the ema stand and the chōzuya – are left cracked and broken, unbefitting a festival half a century in the making.
With a forceful push from his ancestor, Pon takes a job at the local post office, delivering parcels on a tiny bike for cash to pay for repairs and buy event finery.
“A key aspect of this project is that we check everything,”says Edwards. Although the development team included local Japanese people, Edwards and co were keen to ensure that all cultural details were accurate.
“Can we create a shrine or a festival about a tanuki?”Edwards notes.
“We did extensive research,”he continues, adding:
“We have a whole internal encyclopedia of shrines and related items.”
As a tanuki, your responses are limited to emojis – which Edwards sees as a metaphor for his early years in rural Japan, when he was unable to fully communicate with neighbours.
“You can understand what people are saying to you, but the ability and depth of response is stunted,”Edwards says.
“The flip side is, it doesn’t stop any character in the game from helping you, and I think that’s true of Japan as well,”he adds.
“I’ve always found in my time here that no matter how hard things are and how much you’re struggling, when you try to communicate, people still want to help you.”
While you motor through sunflower fields and suburban streets to complete delivery jobs, townsfolk will prod you to engage with their fixations by completing pint-sized activities. “A bit like a mini Yakuza game, you’re going to get involved,” Edwards says. There are all manner of extracurriculars to try out, from sumo to pulling pints in a local izakaya – modelled after the team’s real Kyoto watering hole – baseball and fishing.
“It became a funny joke that every time you deliver a package, there’s going to be an activity there,”Edwards says.
“Which was a nightmare for us because we basically developed 20 different mini-games inside of one game.”
The core of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer is BMXing, with Edwards citing the likes of , and as inspiration. Using a mixture of button presses and joystick flicks, players can shred down handrails and pull off a surprising number of tricks, from backflips to bunny hops and beyond.
“Pon is the vessel through which everything can exist,”says Edwards.
“And because he’s tiny, dumpy and he’s funny, the juxtaposition of him doing BMX tricks is just hilarious.”
To support that ambitious style, Edwards sought help from developer Jacob Mills, who helped ensure the world is primed for trick freestylers with responsive physics and themed stunt obstacles such as bamboo half-pipes. While players will not need intense finger dexterity to progress through the story, Edwards said he wanted making your way from point A to B to be as fun as possible.
“Even if 90% of people don’t know anything about BMXing and they just want to have fun, for that 10% of people who really like BMXing, you don’t want to let them down.”
Denkiworks’ approach blends careful cultural research, rural-life influence and arcade-style movement into a project that is both playful and meticulously grounded. The result is a game built around a tanuki who must repair a shrine, work a delivery job, and take part in an increasingly busy festival season, all while performing BMX tricks through fields and streets.
