It’s hard to stand out at BitSummit, Kyoto’s yearly indie games festival, especially on the third floor where the Nintendo Indie World and Sony booths dominate much of the real estate. But despite taking up a tiny slice of space and running on a single monitor with little adornment, Petal Runner stood out more than most with its vibrant pastel pixel graphics.

At a glance, the quaint little towns and character sprites look like they were pulled straight out of EarthBound or Pokémon Red & Blue. It’s clear to see where developer Nano Park Studios drew inspiration from. As such, the gameplay looks like it might lean into creature-collecting or turn-based combat as you go about cataloguing little critters called HanaPets; however, this isn’t the case.

The core gameplay is to clean up and deliver HanaPets to homes and businesses rather than battle with them, as lead writer Lauren Crown explained as I sat down to play through the demo. They’re for companionship the same way pets are in real life, and it’s your job to install them into people’s homes.

“This is a world where there are no natural animals,” Crown said. “All of the animals you see are these digital pets.”

From what I saw in the demo, there are two kinds of HanaPets: Gen 1, which are all but extinct aside from Kira, the little white fox pal of the main character Cali. The first generation mirrors real-life Tamagochi, as seen when you check up on Kira’s status in the menu. On the other hand, Gen 2 HanaPets reside in Leap Cells which are a bit more biologically based, as these contain flowers that provide the HanaPet with power.

There’s plenty of HanaPets to find. In the demo’s opening moments, I came across a little mouse called Checkers that was looking for ‘snax’ and a snake-like dragon creature called Root Zero that helped me escape from a lab after I cleaned up its Leap Cell. More common HanaPets like Checkers have several different variations while Root Zero is a bit more ‘legendary,’ if you will, and therefore unique.

Again, I battled against none of these critters. Nano Park Studios leans into this, including funny but meaningless little stats like their levels of cuteness and fluff in each HanaPet’s description and — Crown assured me — included a few tongue-in-cheek jokes about the absurdity of battling pets throughout the adventure.

You still do collect them and add them to an encyclopedia, and this isn’t a game without strife. The opening moments see you and your pink-haired friend Dahlia stealing an android sensor to help out her robotic friend. When you manage to nab said part, a ‘corrupted’ HanaPet makes an appearance, which triggers several minigames to clear in order to cleanse it.

These minigames take a page out of Undertale’s graphically simple battle screens and consist of quick, five-or-so-second challenges that wouldn’t be out of place in a WarioWare title, though they’re much less bizarre.

Here, you’re cleaning a little dog by moving the left joystick up and down as fast as possible, mashing ‘A’ for a chubby cat to eat its bowl of food, and — my least favourite, because I messed it up so many times — playing ping pong as a little mouse, strafing to the left and right.

Crown confirmed that there are seven total minigames in the demo, but couldn’t tell me how many there were in the full game. “As for the whole list, we’re working on making it as long as we can before launch. So I don’t know exactly how many, but we’re doing our best.”

When I cleared all of the corrupted HanaPet’s minigames without failing too many times, it was then cleansed, revealing the aforementioned Root Zero critter that then helped us escape from the lab with the android sensor in hand. From there, I separated from Dahlia and received a nasty phone call about late deliveries, so it was back to work with Kira the HanaPet in tow.

Hopping on a little motorcycle, I drove around a gorgeous town called North Valley looking for a nearby mall with the HanaPet shop inside, talking to and registering a few different HanaPets along the way. Here, where the main story progresses, so too does a sidequest that Crown pointed out. A boy named Percy stormed off to chase down a strange HanaPet, and Kira and I decided to help him out.

“I’m particularly fond of this sidequest because the pet you’re chasing started as a weird joke when we were trying to adjust the sprite of another HanaPet and it went all wonky,” Crown said. “I was shocked when our artist created a real sprite for it.”

Crown and the team then turned this messed-up HanaPet — called The Boy — into a sidequest that ties into the narrative’s themes. As Percy, Kira, and I tracked it through the gorgeous little town, residents exclaimed they saw the ugliest little creature running about. We followed it to a little shady spot in the woods where it was glitching out and, as you’d expect, I completed a few minigames to fix it up.

But this time around The Boy didn’t turn into something more visually pleasing. Instead, Percy decided to study it further, ending the quest and highlighting a narrative thread running throughout the demo and presumably the full game: What was happening to the HanaPets? First, the Gen 1 HanaPets are nearly extinct. Root Zero was covered in goop and had to be rescued. And now this wonky, glitched-out creature raised even more questions.

“Petal Runner really is primarily story-based,” Crown elaborated. “It’s about Cali and Kira and that relationship you have with your childhood pet that grew up with you and how important that is.”

Percy and The Boy’s questline also looks like it will explore those relationships between people and their pets, as Percy first perceives The Boy as an academic quandary to solve but — potentially — becomes something much more meaningful and personal to him.

As a lifelong dog owner myself, I began to worry someone might start chopping onions nearby as I played. While I didn’t get a good sense of the overall plot, the demo was packed full of endearing, lighthearted dialogue that I sensed could flip to melancholic and heartbreaking at any moment.

The little white fox Kira often stole the show with his portrait next to his dialogue box, as it featured adorable and expressive animations. Residents in town bickered with each other and one snarky boy challenged me to clean a Leap Cell quicker than he could. HanaPets themselves (they can talk, obviously) asked after ‘snax’ and protested when Kira got their name wrong. As such, I couldn’t help but talk to everyone I ran into as I explored Petal Runner’s gorgeously rendered world.

Crown assures me there are separate areas with different colour palettes. I can’t wait to see them.

But I’ll have to wait a while – at least to play it on a Nintendo Switch. There’s a similar demo to the one I played on Steam and a planned release date in 2026, but a release on a Nintendo console is still unconfirmed. But much like every other small developer I spoke to at BitSummit, the Switch is an eventual goal.

Regardless, Petal Runner’s gorgeous art direction and endearing characters stole the show this year despite the small amount of real estate it commanded, and I can’t wait to play more.