The whole ‘Shinto being used in horror’ thing is very common but your take on it is quite unique amongst games, isn’t it? The only thing I can compare it to is Jade Empire from a few years back which is set in ancient China with very similar themes of the historical mixed with the mystical. But then over time I became more interested in the traditional arts and crafts, the history and the religion and how that feeds into Japanese culture as well. I’ve always been fascinated with various aspects – more so the traditional side – but I got into it because of games, as a lot of people do. You can be walking down the street and see this nice little shrine in the middle of urban Tokyo so it’s a really cool place. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that, but it is true. I love Japan it’s such a contradictory place with the traditional meeting with the modern. Phil: I’ve been to Japan about twelve times over the years. So, were you into this Japanese theme as well Phil or was it something that Jennifer presented to you?
Authentic Japanese games are kind of Acquire’s speciality. During my time there I mostly worked on Samurai and Ninja games. Jennifer: Yes, for four years, I was working in Tokyo for a Japanese game developer called Acquire.
Jennifer, I’m assuming that a lot of this is based on your time in Japan because you spent some time over there, didn’t you? They throw characters together to get a word that sounds good, even if it isn’t strictly a word. That’s why we’ll just use the Romanised version, which they do a lot in Japan anyway. It’s a bit strange because a Japanese person could misunderstand the Tengami kanji as a type of paper you use to absorb oil, when making Tempura (crispy battered vegetables). Phil: (laughs) Yeah, well that’s why we’re using the Romanised version of the word rather than the Japanese because Ryo was like: “This doesn’t actually mean anything”. So if you were to release this in Japan what happens then? So, what’s nice about the first part, the ‘Ten’, if you saw the Kanji, like do you know the red gates? The Torii gates that they have on the shrines? Well that is what the Kanji for ‘Ten’ looks like and it just really works well because we are drawing inspiration from Shinto and Japanese fairytales. It wouldn’t have any meaning to the Japanese. Jennifer: It’s basically a made-up word made out of two real Japanese words but the word itself, Tengami, doesn’t exist in Japanese. The game is based around the whole world being made from paper and it uses a pop-up mechanism which you probably wont have seen from the screenshots, but which you’ll see when you actually play it.
We chose that because it sounded good, but also because the game is based around paper and some of the themes are about Japanese spirits and the Japanese religion Shinto, so the spirit and the paper seemed to make a good name. So it approximately translates as ‘heavenly paper’. But if you actually wrote it in Japanese and showed it to a Japanese person it would look a bit strange to them so that’s why we’ve gone for the Romanised version of it. Phil: Well Tengami, if you wrote it in Japanese characters, is actually made up of two characters which are ‘heaven’ and ‘paper’. What is the inspiration and meaning behind Tengami? While I was there I was also able to sit down and chew the fat with the lovely Phil Tossell and Jennifer Schneidereit, founders of Nyamyam. I had the pleasure of going to see Nyamyam Games a few weeks ago to play their new game Tengami.
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