Zozo and the Lost Dreams heads to Tokyo Game Show

Red Dunes Games and Agate have released a new trailer for Zozo and the Lost Dreams and confirmed the cartoon-styled Metroidvania platformer will be on show at Tokyo Game Show, at Hall 7, booth N03, in Makuhari Messe.

A 13-year-old stuck inside his own dreams

Zozo wants to be a superhero. His neighbour, the brilliantly eccentric Professor Aisha, builds a machine that lets him step into his own dreams and live the fantasy out, which works right up until a mysterious incident traps him inside it. Getting home means working through a series of dream worlds, picking up new abilities and dealing with whatever rules each dream has decided to run on.

The studios are pitching the tone as Saturday-morning television rather than prestige Metroidvania. Every dream is written as its own episode with a separate setting and theme, building towards a finale, and the game carries opening and ending theme songs to match. Visually it pairs pixel-art sprites with rasterised environments, an approach intended to keep the exaggeration of old cartoons without looking like the nineties.

The knockback is the mechanic doing the work

Combat has one rule doing a lot of heavy lifting: enemies bounce when you hit them and collide with whatever sits behind them, so a single strike can ripple through a group like a bowling ball through pins. It is cartoon logic, and it turns positioning into part of the puzzle rather than a stat check.

Release, platforms and what you can play now

The announcement puts the game in 2027 across all platforms, while the Steam listing names Windows and credits Red Dunes Games as both developer and publisher with Agate alongside. A free demo has had its own Steam listing since 31 May. Sultan Al Darmaki of Red Dunes Games guided the concept with Agate, the Indonesian studio co-developing it.

Tokyo Game Show is the reason this is news this week rather than next, and booth N03 in Hall 7 is the practical detail for anyone on the floor. There is no release date more precise than the year and still no console list, which makes the all-platforms line a promise rather than a schedule.

Our opinion

Saturday-morning cartoons are a register games reach for constantly and almost never earn, but the episodic structure here is a real design decision rather than a mood board: self-contained dreams with their own rules is exactly how a cartoon block works, and the knockback rule is the sort of specific physical idea that makes a platformer feel authored rather than assembled. The caution is everything around it. A year-long window, one confirmed platform, a warm trailer and a booth number is an announcement built for a show floor, and all platforms means nothing at all until somebody names the consoles. The free demo is the honest test, and it has been sitting on Steam since May, which is more than most Tokyo Game Show trailers can offer.