Here is a “5D” video game
Plus: A Tetris-style game for people who love March Madness brackets. And a Breath of the Wild-like game for people who love... tires?
Screenbound, an upcoming video game still deep in development, is a 3D game and a 2D game all at once. That’s why its developers are promoting it as a “5D game.”
That’s some iffy math, sure. But the idea behind Screenbound is terrific.
You play as Pavi, searching for your mother in a world called the Q-Realm that you can perceive in 2D and 3D simultaneously. For Screenbound players, that means that you see the 3D world through Pavi’s eyes, while you see the 2D version of that same world in the GameBoy-like Qboy held in Pavi’s hands.
The 20-second clip below shows off those basics, right from the start of the game:
Last month, I played a bit of Screenbound’s first world and got a tease of its until-then secret second world during an Xbox-backed showcase of smaller/indie games. As I played and captured the footage that you can see in this post, producer William Buckle explained the game’s origins.
Some years back, Josh Presseisen, a developer at the indie studio Crescent Moon, was playing Firewatch, the 2016 classic set in a forest, on his portable Steam Deck while walking through a forest.
“He remembers looking down at his Steam Deck and then looking up and seeing the woods and thinking, ‘How can I… this is a thing!”
Presseisen and a development partner made a short visualization of what that could look like as a video game and posted it in early 2024.
They got a good response, and a brainstorm became a real development project. Crescent Moon is now co-developing Screenbound with Buckle’s studio, Radical Forge, which has experience with 3D puzzle games.
Almost exactly 14 years ago, I wrote about a genuine 4D game and, I recall that these things are easier shown than written up.
So, here’s a longer clip of me playing Screenbound, to help you grasp how this only-in-video-games concept works.
(Note: All videos in this post are also on my amusingly meager YouTube channel1, if you prefer to watch them there.)
Observe how the 2D and 3D game world interact.
The Qboy shows a 2D world that represents the ground below and ahead of Pavi in the 3D world.
Veering off that path in 3D is as simple as turning left or right. In the 2D world, it’ll look like Pavi has stayed put (or in other instances, shifted to another 2D plane)
Items sometimes appear in the 2D world, but not in 3D; or vice versa. Early in the clip, for example, Pavi must grab a red balloon shown in the 2D world to traverse a gap in 3D.
Later, the game introduces hazards only visible in 2D and enemies only visible in 3D. Watch this short clip to see both:
To understand how to effectively direct a player’s attention when there’s more than one view to look at, Screenbound’s developers studied games from Nintendo’s mid-2000s two-screened portable, the Nintendo DS. Buckle said the key takeaway was to not put too much information on the secondary screen. Players will mostly be focused on the main one. “People are going to basically focus on the 3D,” he said, of Screenbound. The game will let players position the handheld Qboy in the center or off to the side, to use as a secondary visual reference.
Screenbound has plenty more development to go, though Buckle said the team is hopeful for a late 2026 release. The game is set to launch on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. It’s at least an option for Nintendo, too. They haven’t announced it but one of the game’s reps told me they’d shown Screenbound to the maker of the original Game Boy (I’d asked if the Qboy was legally in the clear; they said Nintendo hadn’t raised any concerns when they showed the game to them).
Screenbound’s publisher is Digital Pajamas, a recent start-up founded by former leaders of TinyBuild, pushing “fair” terms and “sustainable” funding. The publisher’s Allie Paul told me they’ve built up funding from a “lot of non-traditional investors,” including people who typically put their money in real estate. “Even on conservative projections,” she said, investing in games, “is a better [return on investment] than a lot of traditional investments outside of games. Obviously, you never know.”
As for that semi-secret second world in Screenbound….
Back in 2024, after Crescent Moon posted that first post-Firewatch visualization, the studio published a follow-up message:
“ok now imagine playing Link’s Awakening like this”
Link’s Awakening is the first Zelda game that ran on Game Boy. It featured a top-down perspective.
Thus, as shown in a teaser at the end of the Screenbound demo I played last month, here’s a glimpse of the game’s very different second world:
Item 2: More games I played last month in San Francisco that caught my eye…
(These were at a Day of the Devs showcase)
Tournamentris
From Studio ZeF, release date TBD
Like Tetris, but different. Instead of dropping blocks to make lines, you’re dropping different-shaped brackets, to complete tournament brackets. It’s odd and oddly beautiful.
Tire Boy
From GameTeam6, release date TBD
The protagonist of this game is a boy sitting inside a big tire. You roll him through a 3D world that very much feels like Hyrule from Nintendo’s 2017 masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The movement in the game felt fantastic.
Item 3: In brief…
🎮 Yoshihisa Kishimoto, lead creator of influential 1980s co-op beat-em-up Double Dragon, among other classics, has died at 64, Eurogamer reports.
Kishimoto’s son thanked fans for their tributes. “Please continue to enjoy my father’s works with a smile in the future,” he said, in a post shared and translated via X/Twitter.
🤔 Korean game studio Shift Up (Stellar Blade) has acquired Unbound, the new Tokyo-based studio founded by Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, God Hand), in a union of action game experts, Game Developer reports.
👀 An unusual format change: Thick as Thieves, an upcoming game shown in press previews as a competitive player-vs-player heist game from new studio Otherside and new publisher MegaBit, has been reconfigured to be a solo/co-operative game, because its designers say, that was turning out to be “more fun.”
The genre shift is particularly notable because the game’s development has been led by Warren Spector and Greg LoPiccolo, two veterans of the “immersive sim” genre, with games such as Deus Ex and Thief on their resume. They’d previously presented Thick as Thieves as a stab at making that kind of game again, but focused on PvP.
😮 Some surprisingly persuasive fan theories posit that 2025 indie standout Baby Steps is an unofficial spin-off to PlayStation’s marquee Uncharted franchise, per this IGN report.
I am now a believer.
There are reasons it’s so meager. But that’s a story for another day.
Thanks 💐