A 3D adventure game released in 2018 has seen an unusual sales increase about eight years after launch.
Publisher PLAYISM told Japanese outlet AUTOMATON that 灰烬之梦 (Dream of Ashes) sold about 7,000 copies in the week after an update adding Russian and Simplified Chinese. That compares with about 700 copies in the week of its 2018 release, roughly ten times as many units. The update ran alongside a 70% discount. Even after accounting for the discount, a simple comparison of revenue at the two points in time and exchange rates puts revenue at about 2.5 times the earlier figure. Gamersky reported the account.
NAYUTA STUDIO developed the game, the first title from the two-person independent studio of UTUTUYA and KOZUE. Players mainly explore a strange world from the viewpoint of a “mysterious man” and gradually uncover the stories of four girls.
A PLAYISM representative said the clearest change in sales pace appeared around 2025. The strongest catalyst was the global popularity of “dreamcore,” an aesthetic concerned with the eeriness of deserted places and a nostalgic sense of familiarity. The style spread on platforms such as TikTok in the early 2020s.
In Chinese communities it developed a branch called “Chinese dreamcore,” often drawn from everyday scenes of the 2000s and leaning toward warmth and reassurance. The report says this branch became popular again on Douyin, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili from 2025 into 2026. The representative believes later rounds of 70% discounts and unofficial fan-made Chinese patches helped awareness spread, and that about half of the copies sold in the week after the official Chinese update came from China.
The report also stresses that the game did not deliberately pursue a retro look. As an independent title from eight years earlier, it simply aligned with a current aesthetic trend. The representative said the game had already seen smaller waves of interest in Western and Russian-speaking circles, so the rise in China is not an isolated case.
