Survival Quiz CITY

~ the goodbye ~

In 2021 Bandai Namco Studios set up an indie label called GYAAR Studio. The name comes from Gyaa-kun, the wide-mouthed creature the players control in this game, and the label put that character in its own logo so the team would keep hold of whatever it was feeling when it started. Survival Quiz CITY was the first thing the label shipped. It reached Steam on 4 March 2022 and picked up GeForce NOW support six days later. Phoenixx published it.

The format is a quiz show welded to a platformer. Thirty players answer a multiple-choice question and the game sorts them into winners and losers on the spot. Winners pick up a weapon and climb to an outer ring. Losers have the floor drop out from under them and have to reach the goal of a 3D obstacle course while the winners shoot at them from above. Coins are scattered through the stage, and between rounds everyone shops. Losers drop theirs on a fall; winners earn them by knocking people down. Four rounds, then a final: either a last-player-standing format on a narrow ledge, or a money count where a loser who reaches the top of a tower wipes out every coin the winners are holding.

Questions could be written by players, which is the feature that gives a quiz game a long tail and the feature that needs a population to work. Having a stranger's question come up mid-match was most of the appeal, and the bank only stayed interesting while people kept filling it. That dependency was in the design from day one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ winners and losers ~

There were two rule sets. Under survival rules, a loser who failed to reach the goal was out, and the last round put the losers on a small platform and asked them to survive thirty seconds of fire before the next question. Under bounty rules nobody was eliminated for missing the goal, they just lost every coin they were carrying and continued. The second set is the more forgiving design and probably the right one for a party game, and the fact that both shipped suggests the team was not sure which game it had made.

~ the free version buried the paid one ~

On 12 October 2023 Phoenixx released Survival Quiz CITY おまつり編, the festival edition, free on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It was the same game with more in it and a lower lobby cap of twenty, and saves carried over. Nineteen days later, on 31 October 2023, the original paid version was switched off.

Dropping the player cap from thirty to twenty while going free explains most of the rest. You do not shrink a battle royale's lobby because the fights are better that way. You shrink it because thirty people cannot be found.

~ the second notice ~

Phoenixx announced the end on 4 November 2025. Festival coin sales would stop on 1 December at 13:00, with refunds for coins already bought promised and the details to follow. The physical prizes owed to ranked players would only ship to people who had an address on their Bandai Namco ID by 20 November. Service ended on 3 February 2026.

Counting from the paid launch, the thing existed for three years and eleven months in two forms, and the paid one was never on sale again once the free one arrived. A studio's debut title carries a label's founding story in its character design, which means GYAAR Studio now has a mascot in its logo pointing at a game you cannot play.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »