JAPAN GAMING & ENTERTAINMENT 
On September 4, Tokyo-based indie studio Black Tower Studios released a Steam demo for “Dr. Oops!” — a medical deduction adventure currently in development.
The protagonist, suddenly saddled with an enormous debt, takes a job as an unlicensed doctor at a shady hospital in this dark comedy, diagnosing and treating a steady stream of patients. Using conversations with patients, their appearance, and medical questionnaires as clues, players deduce the diagnosis, load the cure into a gun-shaped device, and fire it into the patient. Minigames are also included: CPR plays out as a rhythm game, and brain swaps play out as a crane game. More than 300 patients appear in the game, and the director voices every one of them himself, shifting his voice for each character.
The director is Isao Negishi, who served as Lead Game Designer on “NieR:Automata” at PlatinumGames. Negishi says the project’s starting point was his own experience of searching online for his symptoms and guessing at a diagnosis when his eyesight worsened. He reportedly found the act of narrowing down possibilities from symptoms interesting in itself. He explains that he went with real disease names because he felt the game only comes together the way it does thanks to those names being real. That said, he states that the illness itself is never the target of the joke — the humor instead comes from patients’ own outlandish behavior and the circumstances that bring them to the hospital.
Black Tower Studios was founded in 2012. It was launched by Richie Casper and Kohei Kamata — who had worked on ACQUIRE Corp.’s samurai game series, among other titles — with the idea of building an internationally minded Japanese studio that could make games with the feel of overseas indie titles.
The game was shown at BitSummit, where each demo session ran about 20 minutes. Negishi says only around 3% to just under 5% of visitors stopped partway through, with most playing to the end. From the day after the store page went live through the event, the wishlist count reportedly grew from close to zero to around 1,000. By country, the United States accounted for the most wishlists, followed by Japan.
The demo runs for roughly 30 minutes and covers Day 1 through Day 5. It’s planned for PC, with release slated sometime in 2027. The interface, voice acting, and subtitles are available in English and Japanese; Simplified Chinese is available only for the interface and voice acting. The game will also appear at TOKYO GAME SHOW 2026, running September 17-21, with Black Tower Studios at booth 09-E35 in Halls 9-11.
| Platforms | Release date | Demo |
|---|---|---|
| Steam (PC) | TBA | Yes |
Language: English
As of September 4, 2026