Kodansha has long been one of the bigger names in the anime and manga spaces, but it’s been present in the games industry for a long time too. Most of the titles it has published over the years have been anime or manga tie-ins that never saw wide release outside of Japan, but it seems the company’s strategy has shifted over the past couple of years to favor indie titles, supporting them through Kodansha Game Labs (講談社ゲームラボ).
It’s already seen some hits with the likes of And Roger and Bokura, and it looks like the company is eager to keep the trend going this year as well. Kodansha had many indie titles at TGS 2026, varying very widely in concept and style. This writer, unfortunately, only had time to try three: 4Dead, Buzz or Die and Children’s Garden, but together they offered a good sense of the sorts of experiences Kodansha is promoting. In a word, they were all “different.”
Of the three I played, 4Dead was the most traditional and straightforward. Your character is a blob monster that’s been engineered for one very specific purpose: defeating and destroying an invading alien army. Nothing they do can harm you, but there’s a catch: your body burns so much energy that you’ve only got 4 seconds to live! Fortunately, the aliens are a great source of calories. Just keep eating them and you get to live a little longer!
4Dead presents players with different patterns of aliens to defeat across many levels presented in a top-down isometric perspective. To clear each level, players just have to eat all the aliens. Just dash up to them with one button and then chow down with another. Each meal extends the timer by four seconds, giving more opportunities to deal with the more stubborn enemies.
The game is sort of like a roguelike in that the player’s aim is to use proper level-ups and technique to get as far as possible, and yeah, death means starting over. Levels aren’t exactly the same each time, though, so there should be enough variety to keep things interesting. At least, that’s how it was in the demo.
4Dead releases later this year and will likely have a playable demo during Steam Next Fest, so keep an eye out for it.
My impression of Buzz or Die was of a point-and-click adventuremixed with visual novel and image editor elements. It must sound like an odd mix, but the whole it creates is rather interesting, to say the least. The premise is that your character has been roped into a TV show that pits death row inmates against each other in a battle for clicks. See, their challenge is to delve into each other’s minds, find their darkest or most embarrassing secrets, and then turn them into short videos for the masses to consume.
Whoever gets the most views wins, and they get to walk away with both a pardon and a granted wish. As for the loser, they get both death and having their likeness turned into a line of slave androids. It truly is all or nothing: life and success vs. death and utter humiliation.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/kodansha-game-lab-tgs-2026/
