KEMURI developer UNSEEN has seen a notable number of senior developers leave the studio in the months surrounding the game’s June gameplay reveal. Public LinkedIn profiles and departure posts indicate losses across engineering, animation, level design and other disciplines, adding context to CEO Ikumi Nakamura’s recent comments about the independent studio having limited resources. There is currently no evidence that the departures have delayed KEMURI or placed the project in development trouble.
Power Up Gaming identified a number of publicly verifiable departures from UNSEEN, including animation director Raúl Ibarra DÃez, lead gameplay engineer Aaron Packard, lead level designer Shane Canning, lead engineer Pierre Maury, lead environment artist Yurie Kawana, lead gameplay animator Nagisa Miyagawa, level designer Tom Chomier and lead gameplay designer Kenan Alpay. Several other senior staff members have also publicly announced that they were leaving the company. The departures took place over a period of months rather than as a single publicly announced round of layoffs.
One recent example comes from animator Daniel Zettl, who publicly described his final day at UNSEEN and thanked the team for the work they had completed together. His departure post referenced animation produced for KEMURI and described the project as an effort to blend eastern and western animation styles. UNSEEN has not announced a restructuring, layoffs or a reduction in KEMURI’s scope.
The timing has attracted attention because KEMURI received its most substantial public showing on June 2 during PlayStation’s State of Play. UNSEEN revealed the game’s first extended gameplay footage and confirmed a 2027 release for PlayStation 5 and PC. KEMURI is a third-person action game centered on hunting and possessing yokai, with players able to explore its vertical city alone or through online co-op with up to three hunters.
UNSEEN’s current website still describes the company as a small, international studio and lists employees across engineering, environment art, technical art, QA, production and other disciplines. Its team page includes CEO and creative director Ikumi Nakamura, chief design officer Naoki Katakai, senior gameplay engineer David Steinberg and lead technical artist Omar Espinosa among its current staff. The site is also advertising a marketing position, although most development categories currently show no open roles.
The staffing discussion has become particularly relevant following Nakamura’s recent comments about additional console ports. Asked about the possibility of KEMURI coming to Xbox, Nakamura explained that UNSEEN does not have the same dedicated porting teams available at a larger publisher. She said its engineers would have to absorb that additional work themselves and that her priority is finishing KEMURI properly without overburdening the team.
Nakamura later clarified those remarks after they attracted criticism online, describing UNSEEN as a “very small studio” with limited engineering resources. She said she was pleased that players wanted KEMURI on more platforms but did not want the team to become buried in porting work before completing the game. Those comments establish that development capacity is a real consideration for the studio, but they do not establish that recent staff departures are the reason an Xbox version is not currently planned.
Likewise, the number of departures should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that KEMURI is in difficulty. Staff turnover can occur throughout development, particularly at smaller studios employing international talent and specialists whose roles change as production progresses. Neither Nakamura nor UNSEEN has publicly linked the departures to financial problems, project delays or internal instability.
What the public records do show is that UNSEEN has lost experienced staff from several important development disciplines during 2026. That makes Nakamura’s comments about carefully allocating the studio’s limited resources easier to understand, particularly as the team continues developing its first game while targeting both PC and PS5.
KEMURI remains officially scheduled for 2027. UNSEEN has not announced any change to that window, and there is currently no indication that the recent departures will affect its planned release.
