Kakuriyo no Yūsha

The kakuriyo (隠世) is the unseen world of Shinto belief — the realm of spirits, kami, and ancient forces that run parallel to the world of the living. When a sacred boundary at your shrine is broken, the kakuriyo begins to bleed into the mortal world.

You play as Musubi (結び) — a young shrine guardian named after the Shinto principle of binding and creation. Armed with purification rites and ancestral weapons, you must cross into the spirit realm to restore the boundary before both worlds unravel.

Each area of the kakuriyo is drawn from real Japanese mythology — misty mountain spirits, river gods, shrine foxes, and shadow demons from the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki texts.

The game is built around Shinto values of ma (間, negative space), musubi (結び, connection), and kegare/harae (purification) — reflected in gameplay as silence, patience, and ritual combat rather than pure aggression.

Defold is a lightweight, battle-tested 2D game engine used by studios worldwide, particularly popular in Japan and the indie scene. Its Lua scripting environment, component-based architecture, and zero-setup HTML5 export make it ideal for a mythology-driven 2D RPG.

Game logic is written in Lua, with custom collision handling for multi-layer spirit-world environments and a modular enemy behavior system.