tinyBuild was a surprise presence at BitSummit this year, but certainly a welcome one. The indie publisher, probably best known in Japan for Hello Neighbor and Party Hard, has always had a decent footprint when it came to Japanese streaming, but booth space was generally only for a single title here and there. This year, however, tinyBuild came with a massive degree of both gameplay and presentation.

Besides a whopping ten titles to choose from, tinyBuild decided to go all-in on showmanship with their playable demo of Graveyard Keeper 2, in which players got to hold a Steamdeck while lying in an actual coffin. Due to my chronic condition of noping the hell out of anything that pertains to my own imagined death, I declined to experience the dark management sim’s sequel. But I did sit down with two highly anticipated titles: Speedrunners 2 and Silent Road.

Oh God, I’m back on Xbox Live Arcade!

Speedrunners 2: King of Speed is the followup to DoubleDutch Games’ highly successful indie title from way back in 2016. When tinyBuild was still fairly small, Speedrunners, along with Party Hard and Punch Club, were the games to get this upstart label noticed, and people certainly did. Speedrunners is a highly competitive four player loop race in which you simply have to stay ahead of everyone else as the stage gets more and more stressful. Get a full screen ahead of everyone else and you win. Players have a grappling hook to latch onto certain surfaces (and sometimes grab opponents) as well as the twitchy ability to slide, jump and dash at the right moments to avoid obstacles and keep the momentum going. Easy to understand, it became an instant hit for many, and was even briefly an esport. Just keep running and stay ahead: you get it, right?

Speedrunners 2, which is developed by a different team under the tinyBuild umbrella (Fair Play Labs), is less like a sequel and more like a remake. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Speedrunners was built a decade ago, with graphics and designs that were ideal for the limitations of both DoubleDutch Games’ own machines and the PCs of the time. With a much stronger ceiling for what’s now possible, it makes sense to go back and touch up everything people loved while tweaking what they didn’t. All the old characters – Speedrunner, Hothead, Unic – are included from the get-go, and they’ve been given a fresh coat of paint that really lets them pop on the screen. While the original Speedrunners had a bit of low aesthetic charm to help with performance, being able to really see more details in the animation and the character models is great.

At least two of us are about to eat those boxes.

Additionally, I realized that not having anything seriously changed for the demo makes the most amount of sense. If I, someone who has love for the original Speedrunners, sat down and realized I was in a farming RPG, I would run away, screaming about how a game was ruined. Instead, especially when being able to do a removed side-by-side with the first game, I see Speedrunners 2 captures everything that made the first one delightful and then adding more to it. The controls are tighter, and I got beat by my daughter a couple of times in spite of her never playing the first. The CPU is clever and on top of things without being punishing. The game feels like a 2026 title instead of something old with a graphical mod on top of it. I’m confident that this sequel will stand proudly and bring Speedrunners back into the conversation.

While tinyBuild had plenty of sequels to talk about (there was also a teaser for Hello Neighbor 3 and Streets of Rogue 2), the original titles were an incredible point of focus for many incoming players. Japanese players enjoyed their first go at Hozy and The King is Watching, while all attendees got their first sample of Restory and Hull Rupture. As for me, I took the time to sit down with a little known title, Endflame’s Silent Road. Tucked into the far right corner of the tinyBuild booth, it would have been easy to overlook.  It may not have been the cute or competitive band to beat, but it did have something the others didn’t, which was an atmosphere and gameplay solely focused on making me lose control of my bladder.

Oh, someone dropped something on the side of the road! Let’s pull over and help!

Silent Road is predominantly a storytelling game about being in a haunted village in Japan, and it does so through the most stressful, anxiety inducing method that could exist. You’re a taxi driver who needs to do the night shift, and you exclusively ferry people to and from different points throughout the town. It’s dark as hell, streetlights only exist occasionally, and everything is done up with a very uncanny valley aesthetic. Every single person looks weird in their own way, making you constantly, chronically feel uncomfortable looking at them. You, the taxi driver, get to be the NPC to a series of increasingly upsetting scenarios where horror is always just outside of your eyesight. Sorry, random Japanese schoolgirl, I didn’t see whatever you just saw on the road, and I’m thankful for that!

Now, let’s be very clear: this game is a bit rough around the edges, as you’d expect a demo title to be. Driving is a big part of the game, and it’s honestly a challenge to handle things as you careen off walls, buildings, monuments and taxi stops. You can look around a bit inside your cab, but you turn your head so slowly and methodically that you might miss huge swaths of land and potential story elements if you try looking around. I did like that I could turn around completely and just stare at the passenger while my taxi continued to merrily bounce off trees as I headed in one general direction. But this isn’t a game about being an S class driver or trying to get promoted to head taxi man. This is a game about relentlessly scaring you, and it does a good job.

“Because I’m about to become one! Five…four…three…”

I played for about ten minutes, and nearly threw the controller four separate times. Silent Road has no shame about playing with jump scares, and it will throw them at you in the right cadence to keep you from getting desensitized. Some of them are harmless, some are genuinely scary, and some made me just put down the controller and headphones while I thought about life for a while. In a world where horror games are becoming more complex and sometimes grotesque, there’s almost a refreshing element to a game that takes pleasure in startling you, at irregular intervals, so everyone has a good time and then needs to go change their clothes real quick.

Endflame clearly has a great respect and love for the Japanese horror culture, because Silent Road is pitch perfect in how it presents all the scenarios. The talk of ghosts and haunted beings. The idea of something sinister happening as everyone merely looks on by. A creeping terror that your last bad decision may affect you for the remainder for your short life. And when you suddenly have a passenger in the cab from seemingly nowhere who tells you “Don’t look back,” you fix your eyes on the road and you drive. The lonely convenience store with the neon sign cutting through the dark, the lifeless apartment buildings that seem to scream loneliness at you, and the ancient bridges with abandoned lantern posts on either end…it all adds up to a fantastic emulation of everything that scares me about Japan.

The scariest part of picking this guy up is hearing what he really thinks of Takaishi for the next twenty minutes.

There’s so much more coming in the future for gaming, but tinyBuild really made a splash at BitSummit with some excitement, some competition and some delightful frights. Speedrunners 2: King of Speed and Silent Road will both be out later this year, so keep an eye on the Steam pages and be ready for a brand new experience from your favorite indie publisher!