Analgesic Productions, the two-person game development studio consisting of Marina Ayano Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani, is known for games with rich narratives and the theme of hidden worlds. In December 2025, the studio released a PC game called Angeline Era, whose retro art style resembles Gamecube or Dreamcast games of decades past and features fun gameplay gimmicks. Each level in the game must be found by “searching” parts of an overworld map that look like they might be hiding secrets. That—as well as the fact that it seemed to be a fantasy story—was all I knew when I decided to play Angeline Era. I never expected it to be a hard-hitting emotional exploration of the alienation of a Japanese American person.
Angeline Era’s protagonist is Tets Kinoshta, a former soldier who travels to a place named Era sometime in the 1950s, believing he’s been called there by an angel in his dreams. Era is populated not only by human settlers, but by Fae—who have lived there for a very long time and have a rich history—and also by Angels who arrived in a spaceship that crashed several decades ago. Though it may take until the very end of the game for the player to realize this, Era is a fictionalized Éire (Ireland) and all of its geography, such as its abandoned mines, islands, and mountains, can be overlaid with a map of the real Ireland.
Tets begins the game claiming that only his calling, and not his origin, is what matters. So, at first, Angeline Era mainly explores immigration through fantasy.
To wit, only members of the Fae royalty can open portals that would allow them to return to their homeland, Otherworld, leaving non-royal Fae feeling stranded on Era. And many Fae long to go back home so intensely that they dig deeper and deeper below the Earth and pretend the depths are Otherworld. The Fae who do enjoy living on Earth grapple with humankind, who could potentially destroy the Earth and forget the Fae entirely. Meanwhile, many of the Angels, cut off from their spaceship, have lost their collective memory. Some awkwardly mimic human behaviors (one angel imitates a shopkeeper but sells nothing, another—excited by the idea of sin and redemption—makes up new tragic backstories every day) and others scrutinize Biblical texts to try and understand their own natures. However, there are many signs that they are not actually the angels of the Bible. Humans mistakenly believed them to be, causing their delusion.
While the experiences of the Angels and Fae resonate with those of real-life immigrants, it is only after the game’s apparent main quest is completed that there is a turn toward realism. Suddenly, Tets must return to his home—Los Angeles—because his father is dying. We learn through flashbacks that Tets, his old high school girlfriend, and his father had all been incarcerated at Heart Mountain Relocation Camp. Tets answered “yes” to question 27 on the “loyalty questionnaire” and fought in WWII. He never answered a single one of his girlfriend’s letters. Back in the present, we see him miss his father’s death and succumb to a cycle of drinking and gambling. Fantasy elements of the story are called into question—for instance, blackjack is portrayed via action gameplay of defeating Fae with numbers above their heads.
The game repeatedly shows that some “difference” in Tets led him to always keep people, including other Nisei, at a distance. He never stayed long in LA and rejected the Buddhist faith of his father. In one moment of total hopelessness, Tets claims that if he ever completed his mission—if angels no longer called to him in his dreams—he would be more alone than ever. A childhood trauma involving abduction by the Angels could be the thing informing his behavior. But, if the fantasy elements must be questioned, it could be something deeper. Perhaps the biggest lacuna in this game is the question of why Tets’s mother returned to Japan, leaving Tets and his father behind. Tets refers to her as if she is still alive, and his only memories of her seem to be from his early childhood, long before WWII began (meaning she likely did not return to Japan to repatriate in the lead-up to the War). Instead, it is Tets’s connection with his father that is constantly explored. His father would entertain men by putting on makeup and dressing in a yukata, he had a feminine Dharma name, and it is he who becomes a symbol of Tets’s heritage and perhaps a representation of both father and mother to Tets.
Could Tets’s trauma actually involve the separation of his parents? Could the reason they separated be impossible for Tets to find, just as the Fae searching underground will never find their home?
Perhaps my favorite aspects of this game are the ways in which it could inspire gamers to become curious about real-world history and spark valuable discussions. Thinking through the game’s narrative led to my having many interesting conversations with my father (a mixed-race Korean immigrant who spent a lot of time on U.S. army bases as a child). For instance, in one quiet moment in Angeline Era the player has Tets examine wood carvings his father had made. Tets then finds one that is clumsily-carved—a wooden bald eagle—and realizes it was not his father’s handiwork. Tets himself had made it when he was a child. I remember thinking this was a very on-the-nose symbol of how Tets must have internalized pro-U.S. propaganda in his youth. But then my father explained he had done pretty much the same thing as a child when he decorated a wooden trivet in shop class! In this time when immigrants are being so vilified yet again, Angeline Era unexpectedly speaks to the moment. The story follows the struggles of a Nisei man, but resonates with many different people. This game is a great vehicle to deeper understanding.
