Horror game legend Ikumi Nakamura swaps her love of gore for true romance by helping dev use custom sidequest as real-life proposal: "Moments like this remind me how lucky I am"

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Romance isn't dead!

Kemuri
(Image credit: Unseen Inc)

Like so much of the lonely world, some lonely heart gamers may struggle to find a significant other — their duo, their twinblade swordsperson, so to speak — but don't let anyone tell you that gaming isn't romantic. The Evil Within artist and Unseen studio founder Ikumi Nakamura showed gaming's sensitive side recently by encouraging her employee to plan his real-life proposal inside the game he was working on. 

"Never did I imagine directing not just the timing, but even the acting cues for a developer's marriage proposal!" Ikamura writes on Twitter. 

Unseen's lead level designer, and now proud fiancé, Shane Canning came up with the idea first: propose to his girlfriend Makiko through the yokai hunter action game he's been creating, Kemuri. All he had to do was give it a special side quest and invite Makiko to "playtest" it. 

As seen in a video of the proposal posted on the Unseen Twitter account, Nakamura helps a nervous Canning choreograph what he'd do once Makiko reached a key part of the sidequest; a non-playable character reaches into her pocket for something small, then seems to flick it through the screen.

Later, Makiko is confused when she hits this part of the quest, but Canning, as he rehearsed with Nakamura, quickly pretends to grab the object and reveal it to Makiko as her glittering engagement ring. She says yes, and Kemuri erupts into gold fireworks. 

"Level designers of the world. This will be the standard proposal for level designers in the gaming industry!" says a DeepL translation of a Twitter post Nakamura made on January 6. "Unseen is a company that will create new legends in the industry - not only in the field of games, but also in the field of proposals."

Feeling all lovey-dovey? Here are the 10 best dating sims to play right now. 

Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.