For Immediate Release Antonina
Date 28.05.2026 antonina@nozomugames.com
● Self-publishing indie studio Nozomu Games releases Burn With Me Demo during Thinky Direct showcase
● Burn With Me is a story-rich deckbuilder about students summoning demons to fix their lives
● Nozomu Games is a married couple creating games together with their friends
[Munich, Germany, 28 May 2026] – Small indie studio Nozomu Games released the demo of a story-centric card game, “Burn With Me”, as a part of the Thinky Direct showcase. This demo will be available for players to explore starting May 28, 2026. The team that grew out of gamejam prototyping makes a bigger game and combines a strong narrative with a thoughtful game design. “Burn With Me” holds appeal for both deckbuilding enthusiasts and players who value good stories.
Burn With Me is a “deck-burner”: a card game where you burn your cards for power, but push it too far, and you’ll be left with nothing to play. This mechanic rhymes with the story about demons, obsessions and desires, as fire both takes and gives, and one should not be careless with it. The story follows the lives of occult university students who discover ancient rites and invocations under the guidance of their obsessed Teacher. To summon a personal demon, one has either to tame their obsession or dissolve in it completely. Thus, the mechanics of each chapter reflect the student's emotions, desires, and fears.
“At the core of Burn With Me are very simple, but unique and addictive mechanics”, – says Ivan, the dev and the game designer. – “This is what the prototype version at Ludum Dare 55 showed us. But for the full release of the game we needed to add emotions, atmosphere and a story. We haven’t done anything like this before, but eventually we got a perfect dark and jazzy cocktail of a game”.
The game features 6 chapters with unique stories, cards, mechanics and bosses. The demo presents the first chapter of the story.
Outstanding visuals: all the art for the game is created by one person, Eva. Beside the hand-drawn graphics there’s the Hand which is actually real-life footage. This artistic choice emphasises on the otherworld nature of this mysterious character and adds to the disturbing eclectic vibes of the game.
Successful prototype: the initial version of Burn With Me got to top-1% in Ludum Dare gamejam and has now more than 20000 players. It even got the personal endorsement by Daniel Mullins, author of Inscryption.
Wholesome team behind the game: the core of Nozomu Games is a married couple creating games together. Eva is a narrative designer and sole artist of the game. Ivan is a Godot Engine enthusiast who gave a talk at GodotCon 2023 about Robot Detour, the first commercial release of the studio. Other team members are friends they made along the way.
Forge your personal ritual and light up the fire of your soul: try out Burn With Me Demo on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2954010/Burn_With_Me/ ;
For more information about Nozomu Games and updates on Burn With Me, please visit our website at nozomugames.com or follow us on social media: YouTube, Discord, X (Twitter), and BlueSky.
About Nozomu Games
Nozomu Games is a self-publishing indie game studio founded in 2023. The core of the team is a married couple located in Munich, Germany, – Ivan Bushmin and Eva Manuilovich. The extended team includes composer Nikita Melnikov, sound designers, additional artists, and marketing managers.
Nozomu Games aims to make games packed with surprises, unique mechanics, and novel experiences, preferring gameplay-based storytelling. The studio's debut commercial game was Robot Detour, a puzzle game with a unique cable mechanic.
The team sees gamejams as the best learning tool, and it participated in 10+ gamejams like Ludum Dare, GMTK Gamejam, etc. Studio’s games get to the top-2% in the main categories of these jams, and the most recent jam game, Love Letters, got 2nd place in the narrative category of GMTK Gamejam 2025.
Links
● Press-kit: Burn With Me - presskit
● Website: https://nozomugames.com/ ;
● Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2954010/Burn_With_Me/ ;
● Twitter: https://x.com/NozomuGames ;
● BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/nozomugames.com ;
● YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NozomuGames ;
● Discord: https://discord.com/invite/gR9eYKKpsP ;