Bokeh Game Studio, headed by Silent Hill and Siren series creator Keiichiro Toyama, has revealed that it’s working on a new, large-scale title. In a recruitment message penned by Toyama himself, the company announced that its hiring staff across multiple positions for the project.
This will be Bokeh Game Studio’s second title after Slitterhead, an AA-scale horror action game that released in 2024 to moderately positive reception. In his new message, Toyama describes Slitterhead as a project that helped his studio “finally reach a starting line,” suggesting the game was Bokeh’s way of starting out small before moving onto something more ambitious in scale.
Currently, Bokeh Game Studio has 35 staff members, and all of them are involved in the new unnamed project. Toyama admits that the development process is a “cycle of trial-and-error and by no means an easy path,” but encourages experienced developers to join his team for the opportunity to shape the project while it’s in its formative stages. The studio is looking to upsize by at least sixteen people, including programmers, artists, game designers and marketing staff. Incidentally, most of the openings are listed as urgent.
Reiterating on Bokeh Game Studio’s values, Toyama says the goal is to pursue originality and create games that nobody else can. “This doesn’t mean we pursue novelty for its own sake, but rather that we persistently ask ourselves ‘Why create this? Why should we be the ones to create it?’ and never abandon these questions until we achieve creative expression only possible to us,” he writes.
This new project is likely the same one Toyama briefly referenced in July last year, which means it’s been in the works for quite some time now. While information is still scarce, we do know what it won’t be a sequel to Slitterhead.
Slitterhead is one of the bright spots in Video Games and really made me happy to see a studio pursue originality and create interesting experiences than formulaic generic experiences we have seen a lot of in the past decade. I am really hoping their next project takes off and others in Japan start looking into trying it themselves.