Did you hear about Awaysis?

A novel, upcoming dungeon crawler, with an unusual funding deal from Xbox and a soundtrack from a Nintendo legend

“It’s just tough getting seen,” game designer Jake Kazdal was telling me earlier this year, in a hotel suite in Las Vegas as he showed me Awaysis, the next video game from his veteran indie team at 17-Bit.

“I’ve talked to a lot of close friends that know a lot,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Have you not seen anything I’m doing?’”

Awaysis is an upcoming top-down sword-fighting dungeon crawler that uses a complex physics system to give its characters’ movements noticeable momentum and weight.

The game’s mix of inspirations includes Chrono Trigger and Super Mario 64, channeled to make something that feels cutting edge to play now.

Awaysis was revealed and promoted back in June 2025. It was featured in a Day of the Devs showcase last December and had a demo on Xbox.

Yet Kazdal and his team are still facing down the dominant challenge of the modern game developer: working in a field flooded with more than 10,000 new games a year, trying to get people to notice.

“There’s been a lot of stuff,” Kazdal said, of the distractions that might keep people from hearing about the game he’s been working on since 2022. “There are a lot of shows. There’s constantly things going down.”

It can’t help that Awaysis’ most arresting element is not how it looks or even sounds (though there’s a good story involving a Nintendo legend there), but how it feels to play.