Team9's ๆๅญ้ๆฏ has won the 2026 Game Designers Award, becoming the final recipient of a prize created to recognize unusually original game design. The Japan Game Awards' official winner page credits Team9 as developer alongside ESQUADRA, with Flyhigh Works publishing the Japanese release on Steam, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5.
The choice is unusually literal. Every person, object and backdrop in ๆๅญ้ๆฏ is assembled from written characters. The arrangement of those characters becomes the scenery and navigable field, while the protagonist, ๆ, moves through sentences and changes their meaning or structure to solve puzzles. A gate may be a word that can be manipulated, and characters can be joined or separated to open a path.
A localization problem inside the game design
CESA's judges said ๆๅญ้ๆฏ received an overwhelming share of votes after the field narrowed in the second round. Their rationale focused on how immediately the game distinguishes itself, but also on a harder problem behind the Japanese edition: the design began in Traditional Chinese, even though its interactions can appear inseparable from Japanese writing.
That made localization more than replacing dialogue. The wordplay, visual composition and puzzle logic all had to keep working in another language. The judges called out the technical skill and invention required for that conversion and described the game as a fitting final winner because its central idea would be difficult to imitate.
Producer ๅผตๆ้ connected that cross-language work to the studio's own history. In a message published by the awards organization, he wrote that Team9's members grew up in Taiwan playing Japanese games. Those games did not teach him Japanese, he said, but they did teach a shared โlanguage of funโ through pixels, sound, curiosity and surprise.
He said the team began noticing similar possibilities in everyday Chinese. One early spark was a pun printed on the seal of a bubble-tea cup. That small joke eventually grew into an adventure in which language is not simply read but played.
The award ends after 16 years
The September 15 ceremony also closed the Game Designers Award itself. GAME Watch reported that jury chair Masahiro Sakurai said active game creators have little time to take on the judging work and that there was no one to replace him after 16 years.
Sakurai also argued that originality remains important even when it does not neatly drive sales. That makes ๆๅญ้ๆฏ an apt last selection: a game whose commercial format is familiar, but whose most basic building block, the written character, has been turned into world, hero and rule set at once.
Gaming