TIMEMOON is a VN all about being a time-traveling taxi driver, and it was my TGS 2025 game of the show

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating - my favorite aspect of going to large-scale industry events are seeing indie projects. For Tokyo Game Show 2025, the one that stood out to me was TIMEMOON - a Narrative Adventure where players take control of Clark, a taxi driver on the moon in the distant future. Except, instead of ferrying passengers to specific locations, there's a twist. Your taxi cab is a time machine, Back to the Future style, and once you reach a certain speed you can send your passengers elsewhere in time. In the backdrop of the death of the President, there's an expectation that time travel might have played a part in the plot, and so its up to you to help figure out who did it, and why.

This all manifests in a unique loop. Before picking up your next customer, you'll be treated to two versions of the same newspaper. Any changes are the result of a time travel paradox, and as such those are your clues as to what may have happened, and a hint for what might be worth touching upon when trying to investigate the circumstances. Unfortunately, such investigations aren't so simple.

Clark can only really investigate changes in space-time within the confines of his own cab. This means that any interactions with your passengers are presented in the context of your drive. Choices are diegetic; presented as how you literally drive the conversation in a timed sequence, whether you weave left or right. Sometimes a passenger will present an item for you to take or investigate, and you must do so quickly, framed as you trying to keep your eyes on the road.

While sometimes you have time to think through your actions, the swings from a relaxed drive ramping up as the time travel sequence begins - and so, your last chance mad dash to piece together the rest of the puzzle - lends itself a highly engaging pacing, reminiscent of stuff like a class trial in Danganronpa. You only have so much information heading into things, and the impression I was left with is that it's entirely possible to discover the truth of a situation, while perhaps bungling keeping your passenger's reactions.

In our demo, we managed to suss out the how and why for our first suspect and what he'd done - ending on what felt like a good ending for the encounter after we took him to the past and somehow convinced him of his mistakes. The path getting there already showed some fascinating writing chops - we can't speak to the state of the English localization as of yet. I didn't want my experience to be hampered by a translation in progress. Fruitbat Factory is on the game's localization, so I fully expect the final project to be a polished release.

Speaking of polish, everything from the game's presentation to its soundtrack oozes charm. The game's artstyle is evoking a PC-98 VN of the era, albeit using modern technology. The vibes were immaculate, and fits the tone the game is gunning for pitch perfectly. While it's unsurprisingly too early to say how everything else about the project might stack up in the end, I'm convinced there's no need for concern about the presentation at the very least. The team's previous work in Mamiya was seemingly very well received - I'll be checking it out for myself shortly, after how impressed I was with TIMEMOON's TGS demo - so there's a good chance they'll stick the landing here, too.

TIMEMOON releases for Windows PC sometime in the future. Stay tuned as more information gets released in the weeks and months ahead.