All Our Asias

Following release, the game received positive reception for its nuanced narrative and visual presentation, and won an Honorable Mention for the Nuovo Award at the 2019 Independent Games Festival.

• Title — All Our Asias • Developer — Analgesic Productions • Platforms — Windows, Mac, Linux • Genre — Adventure • Released — 7 February 2018

The developer, Melos Han-Tani, introduces themselves at the start of the game and explains the purpose of the game is to explore questions around Asian identity and common qualities to the Asian diaspora. The game is played from the perspective of Yuito, a Japanese-American hedge fund manager who enters a virtual reality system using technology named Memory World Visitation. The virtual reality allows Yuito a limited time to explore a reconstruction of the memories of his estranged dying father, who has become unable to talk. In the Memory World, Yuito is able to talk to conversations with people in his father's memories to learn about him. In the later stages of the game, set in a simulated Chicago, Yuito meets a figure called the General, who promises to share information about his father. The General challenges Yuito's attempts to identify with his father and the Asian diaspora characters he meets throughout the game. Yuito, who considers himself Asian and identifies closely with others who share the same label despite having a different class background, is confronted with understanding what it means to be part of the Asian community beyond the notion of shared heritage.

All Our Asias was created by Analgesic Productions, the studio of Melos Han-Tani. Han-Tani is a Tokyo based game developer, composer and programmer, formerly a game design and music lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Han-Tani stated the project was made with the aim of telling a "rich" and "thematically" dense narrative within the medium of the game, citing games such as Kentucky Route Zero for inspiration. The game was written as indirectly autobiographical and based on Han-Tani's past experiences living in Chicago, with the game's protagonist based on an imagination of a "future projection" of Han-Tani had they taken a different direction at a previous point in their life. Han-Tani stated their process was to focus on a "few familiar topics", including "race consciousness", "masculinity", and "complicating the notion of Asian America", and "minimize them" by focusing on the experiences of a single character. The game was released for free on Steam and itch.io.