Inside the Twisted Worlds of Yunyun Syndrome and Drunken Goddess Reflux

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LOS ANGELES, CA- Inside the strange worlds of Fuyuki Hayashi and odyk, the creators behind Yunyun Syndrome!? Rhythm Psychosis and Drunken Goddess Reflux.

“Everything you need is here.”

I’m standing in a hotel room near the Los Angeles Convention Center as I’m handed a USB stick.

AX interviews usually begin at a booth, in a press room, or at a folding table wedged somewhere between a line for merch and several thousand people trying to get to the next panel. Being escorted to a hotel room and handed a small piece of physical media with those particular words feels slightly more clandestine. The USB contains press materials, of course, but for a few seconds, I have the distinct impression that I’ve been recruited into Japanese game-development intelligence.

Across from me are Fuyuki Hayashi and odyk, two Japanese game creators whose current projects are considerably more grotesque than either of them initially appear. Hayashi-san, who also works under the name WHO YOU, created Yunyun Syndrome!? Rhythm Psychosis, while odyk worked on its animation and illustration before taking on a larger visual role in their next game, Drunken Goddess Reflux. An interpreter sits with us, carrying the conversation back and forth between Japanese and English while I try to reconcile the easygoing people in front of me with a rhythm game about a hikikomori slipping deeper into obsession and a second game built around potentially lethal intoxication.

Hayashi-san and odyk are funny, curious, and enthusiastic, and Hayashi-san becomes particularly animated when I ask about music. Yunyun Syndrome is built around denpa songs, the hyperactive, sugary, frequently strange corner of Japanese otaku music that can sound impenetrable if you have never encountered it and immediately recognizable if you have.

I ask why denpa was the right sound for Qtie, the game’s isolated protagonist.

“I personally liked denpa songs, in particular when I was in middle school,” he says. “Denpa songs really helped me get through hard times, and listening to denpa songs really boosted my morale, my self-esteem and whatnot.”

“It was like an electric shock that revived my dead heart.”

Very poetic.

When I ask what they listen to while working, the conversation expands into J-rock. The iconic RADWIMPS comes up, then odyk recommends NANANINE, a band obscure enough that my unfamiliarity becomes its own small discussion, followed by Swinging Popsicle and NICO Touches the Walls. The names come through the interpreter in stages, with some spellings requiring a little collective reconstruction.

“Are you familiar with NANANINE?” I’m asked.

I am, now!

“Very, very niche!” comes the explanation.

Eventually, we circle back to denpa, where asking Hayashi to choose favorites proves equally difficult. His answer is essentially that he likes all of it. The songs already included in Yunyun Syndrome, the interpreter explains, are basically his playlist.

One favorite does emerge: Nanahira’s “Neko to Switch.” Nanahira also voices Qtie, giving the connection another layer that feels typical of how this project came together. It feels less like a neatly assembled soundtrack than a group of people pulling from music and internet culture they were already genuinely attached to.

When I ask Hayashi-san how they balanced the game’s aggressively cute presentation against the much darker things happening underneath, he points me toward details the player can easily miss.

“For the main story part, we wanted to keep it nice and light and not too dark,” he explains. “But since you mentioned the dark parts of the game, there are parts when you play in your room, and there are some things in your room that kind of indicate that there are dark things going on in the background.”

“And again, that’s not the main part of the game,” Hayashi-san says. “It’s just subtext in the game that you could interact with.”

Hayashi-san describes their approach as “sprinkling dark aspects into the game,” rather than allowing them to overwhelm everything else.

“I think what people first notice about the game, obviously, if they haven’t played it, is probably the art style,” Hayashi-san says. “The game does feature a lot of Japanese culture, but obviously you don’t need to know Japanese culture to play the game.”

There are references and conspiracy theories throughout it, he explains, and players who become curious can investigate them further.

“Treat it as an entry point to Japanese culture if you’re not too privy to Japanese culture,” he says. “Don’t let the Japaneseness, Japanese cultureness of the game stop you from trying out this game.”

“Music unites,” I say.

“Exactly!” the team behind the grotesque games cheerfully agrees.

Neither creator treats darkness as something requiring a permanently grave expression.

The game certainly found listeners. It launched with 15 supported interface languages on Steam and maintains a Very Positive English user rating at the time of writing. The language barrier turns out not to be much of one when the soundtrack is moving fast enough.

Drunken Goddess Reflux presents a different communication problem. Its premise requires very little translation.

“Russian Roulette × Drinking Survival × Demon,” reads Alliance Arts’ official description, which covers the essentials efficiently. Femme Soule challenges the player to a drinking game in which every shot carries a different effect. The drunker everyone gets, the less reliably the rules function. The game is planned for release in 2026 and passed 300,000 Steam wishlists within three weeks of its announcement. Fuyuki Hayashi, odyk, and Nanahira all returned from the Yunyun Syndrome team, while Aiobahn +81 provides music for the theme song, with lyrics and vocals by DEMONDICE.

Femme Soule becomes less capable of policing her own game as the alcohol takes effect, creating opportunities to exploit the situation. Your own condition is hardly better. One available solution to staying conscious involves an ice pick and a hand, a detail that rather effectively kills any possibility of mistaking this for a cute bar simulator.

I ask Hayashi-san whether his experience with drinking connects to the game.

“I made a lot of mistakes while drinking in the past,” he says. “So I guess in that sense, there’s a lot of that in the game.”

odyk has done his own research, although Tokyo has apparently provided most of it without being asked.

“When it comes to the animation, living in Tokyo, both of us see a lot of drunk people walking around,” he says through the interpreter. “Some of them are crazy.”

Watching how people behave while intoxicated became useful reference material for the game’s animation and art direction. This is where living in Tokyo gives me an unusually immediate frame of reference. Shinjuku comes up. Shibuya comes up.

odyk’s role also makes the visual progression between the two games interesting. On Yunyun Syndrome, the official credits place him on game animation and illustration alongside mamimu’s character designs. At Anime Expo, he appeared with Hayashi-san for a creator session advertised around the games’ development and visual direction, including a live drawing demonstration. It was his first time doing one.

Drunken Goddess Reflux gives him another kind of physical comedy to work with. Femme Soule is cute enough to make the initial proposition seem manageable, right up until the consequences begin stacking up. When I ask what a player should pay attention to the first time through, Hayashi-san starts with her.

“The game has psycho-horror aspects to it. Obviously, the main antagonist, Femme Soule, is her name. She’s really cute,” he says. “But she is—she could be very destructive.”

He thinks alcohol works in roughly the same way.

“When you drink a little, you could have a really fun time, not have any issues, but when you do it too much, it could ruin your night, week or a month. I don’t know how long. So I think we want people to kind of experience that aspect about drinking as well as with the characters.”

It is a remarkably measured answer for a game whose official store copy promises that “the more you drink, the more the rules break down.”

Naturally, I ask whether the people responsible for this game actually play drinking games themselves.

The first response is essentially a wall of “no.”

After some clarification, it becomes apparent that they have played Japanese drinking games before, just not especially often. I try to contribute something useful from my own past.

“Spin the bottle when I was like…” I trail off, doing the math and deciding against it. “Many years ago. I don’t do that anymore.”

“We’re professionals, huh?” the guys laugh.

At least for the duration of the interview.

By then, odyk is also having his first experience of the United States. Their trip is short: they arrived Wednesday and are leaving Saturday. He tells me he knew beforehand that American buildings and interiors would be different from Japan, but seeing them in person was another matter. Anime Expo itself has provided a string of firsts: his first panel, his first live drawing, and the chance to see who actually turns up for an anime and Japanese-game convention thousands of miles from home.

“What I look forward to the most is seeing what kind of people, especially outside Japan, come to these events,” he explains through the interpreter.

The answer, at Anime Expo, is approximately everyone. The convention sprawls across the Los Angeles Convention Center with enough competing subcultures to make “anime fan” nearly useless as a single description. For Hayashi-san and odyk, that meant taking games born from extremely Japanese reference points, including denpa music, anonymous-board culture, and Tokyo nightlife, and putting them in front of an audience that did not necessarily arrive with any of that vocabulary.

It also meant getting out of the convention center when they could. They had tried American beer at a bar down the street and shopped at Trader Joe’s.

“They really like the food over here so far,” the interpreter tells me.

“Especially Mexican?”

“Yes.”

This is a choice I can endorse. I’m from Southern California and tell them that Mexican food is one of the few things I genuinely miss when I spend long periods in Japan. The conversation briefly becomes an exchange of what each place does better, which is probably inevitable whenever people from Tokyo and Southern California are put in the same room and allowed to discuss food, prices, and public transportation.

The exchange rate comes up too, for reasons that affect Hayashi-san more directly than the average tourist. Steam pays him in dollars. Turning those dollars into yen is pleasant. Traveling in the opposite direction is less so.

“Going from here to over there is really nice,” the interpreter says of the currency conversion. “Coming from Japan to over here is like, holy cow.”

“I do miss the prices,” I tell them.

That part also requires no translation.

After an hour spent moving between Japanese and English, middle-school playlists and internet psychosis, Tokyo drunks and an affectionate demon capable of ruining considerably more than your evening, the strangest part is how normal it all starts to feel. For all the grotesque imagery and unsettling premises of their games, Hayashi-san and odyk seem most interested in the familiar things underneath: music that gets us through difficult times, the strange ways people behave, and the shared experiences that make even the most peculiar ideas feel surprisingly human.

Maybe that’s the real trick behind their work. The worlds they create may be bizarre, but the people and obsessions that inspire them are not nearly as unfamiliar as they first appear.

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