📰 2023 April Zine Issue and Wrap-Up!

Written by Renkon

The weeks just fly by like a flurry of cherry blossom petals! The cold days of winter are finally giving away to sunshine and spring flowers. And also, the Indie Tsushin 2023 April zine issue!

The zine is viewable in browser on itch, and available for download in PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats on itch and Ko-Fi. We also have digital postcards and the Japanese interview editions (インタビュー特集) to download. It is PWYW so everyone can enjoy it! We really hope that you will check it out!

Here's what's inside:

Fifteen interesting games from Tokyo Sandbox on April 15th!

We have our first guest article by Squimmy, about the unsettling and very cool adventure game, ファミレスを享受せよ (Famiresu wo Kyojuseyo) by Oississui!

Game profile of ふりかけ☆スペイシー (Furikake Spacy) by 4ton Tomatine, a hilarious comedy visual novel set in the bizarre Neo Showa!

Game profile of VacationReels by Arai Hitoe, a contemplative fishing game you can play in your browser!

We had the chance to speak with ICHI about working as an illustrator both in and outside of games, plus their work with Takahiro Ueda on Tails of the Kyuubi!

We had the chance to speak with Oississui about working on the sci-fi adventure game, Famiresu wo Kyojuseyo!

We had the chance to speak with 4ton Tomatine about their hilarious comedy visual novel set in the bizarre Neo Showa, Furikake Spacy!

We had the chance to speak with Arai Hitoe about pixel art, game development, and their contemplative fishing game, VacationReels!

Sneaking in at the tail end of April is Konami Indie Games Connect on the 30th, this Sunday! Daikon and I will be walking around and playing a bunch of games. Follow us on Mastodon to see our live-toots about it!

Just a heads up that we are planning to combine our June and July issues and release it on June 30, with the next release in August. This is so that we can have a bit of a summer break! We may still update the blog during July, but if we do, those articles will go in the August issue, and we will be skipping the July release.

Get the 2022 December, 2023 January, and 2023 February issues all in one $10 bundle! It's a great way of supporting the zine!

Check out the 2023 March issue and its games if you haven't yet! And be sure to look through our full catalog for more great stuff!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and tune in every Thursday from 9PM UTC+9 for Happy Hour, a bilingual show introducing some indie games!

Just kidding! Indie Tsushin is ad-free, does not (and will never!) run sponsored content, and is mostly made by two people in their spare time. We write the articles, buy the games out of pocket, conduct and translate the interviews, lay out and edit the website and zines, pay for hosting and recording equipment, and so on. We do all this because we are gigantic nerds and hope that more people can play and appreciate Japanese indie games and their developers. We would gladly do it even if we never made a single yen from this.

BUT! If you enjoyed the zine, please consider buying our zines! Any amount would be more than enough, and would go a long way towards boosting our morale and keeping us going. Not only that, it lets us pay guest writers to appear in the zine! If you can't afford to donate, don't even worry about it! Indie Tsushin will always be available to read for free and will never go behind a paywall. You can help us a ton just by sharing our articles and videos, or rating and reviewing our zines on itch.io. Thank you so much for all of your kind support!

We also have a Ko-Fi where you can make a one-time donation or sign up for our ¥‎300/month tier.

That's all for now, but be sure to check the Indie Tsushin blog for the latest articles, follow our Steam curator account, subscribe to the feed, and sign up for our monthly e-mail digest so you don't miss anything! Hope you enjoy the issue and games!

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