Nomori Release Date, Price, and Everything Explained
Nomori, the portal-and-gravity puzzle adventure from Dutch studio Enchanted Works, launches September 23, 2026 on PC and Xbox for $19.99. Here's the confirmed release date, price, story, and mechanics.
A new puzzle adventure is arriving on PC and Xbox this month, and it is built almost entirely around a single trick: portals that let you see and touch the same space from more than one angle at once. Nomori, developed by the small Dutch studio Enchanted Works, launches on September 23, 2026, closing out a development cycle that started with a free prologue back in 2022. Here is everything confirmed so far about the release date, price, story, and the gravity-and-portal mechanics that set it apart from other cozy puzzle games.
1. What Is Nomori?
Nomori is a single-player puzzle-adventure game in which players control Kiko, a young traveler who journeys through a whimsical, Japanese folklore-inspired Spirit World. According to Enchanted Works' own press materials, the game's core hook is a set of "Spirit Powers" that let Kiko place, shift, and rotate portals, changing gravity for objects — and for herself — to reach areas that look impossible to enter. The studio has described the effect as similar to stepping inside an M.C. Escher drawing, where up and down are never fixed for long.
The full game is built around four unique domains, each with its own environment, puzzle mechanics, and cast of spirit characters, adding up to more than 40 individual puzzle islands to solve across the adventure.
2. Release Date and Platforms
Enchanted Works confirmed Nomori's launch date with an official "Release Date Reveal" trailer on its YouTube channel: the game goes live on September 23, 2026 for PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store, plus Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. There is no PlayStation or Nintendo Switch version confirmed at this time — if that changes, it will most likely be announced after the PC and Xbox launch has had time to land.
The Steam store page currently lists Nomori as "coming soon," with the storefront switching over automatically at launch. Anyone who wants a taste beforehand can already download Nomori: Prologue, a free four-level demo that has been available in Early Access since 2022 and uses the same core rotate-and-portal mechanics as the finished game.
3. Price and Where to Buy
According to Enchanted Works' official press kit, Nomori will launch at $19.99 USD / €17.99 EUR on both Steam and the Microsoft Store. That price gets you the full campaign across all four domains — there is no mention of a separate deluxe edition or paid DLC at launch. Wishlisting the game on Steam or the Xbox store is the safest way to get notified the moment it unlocks on September 23.
4. Story and Setting
Nomori's narrative follows Kiko as she explores a Spirit World stitched together from floating islands, each cut off from the others until her portal powers reconnect them. The tone leans gentle rather than tense: in one exchange shown in Enchanted Works' own marketing screenshots, a river spirit named Oshosan tells Kiko about a long-held dream of opening a tea shop, and the world is full of small character moments like this rather than combat or failure states.
The four domains each carry their own visual identity and season, moving from cherry-blossom springs to warm autumn woodland to stranger, more otherworldly caverns deeper into the story. Enchanted Works has said the writing draws on Japanese folklore for its cast of spirits without recreating any single specific myth, giving the studio room to build its own creatures and locations.
5. Portals, Gravity, and the Puzzle Mechanics
The puzzles themselves revolve around a small set of powers that combine in increasingly complex ways. Kiko can place a portal on one surface and a matching exit on another, then physically rotate her own perspective or an object's gravity to walk through what used to be a wall, ceiling, or floor. Later puzzles add time manipulation on top of the portal-and-gravity system, letting players record an object's movement and then play it back to solve timing-based challenges — for example, riding a platform that only exists because a past version of it was captured a moment earlier.
Puzzle design on Nomori was handled with input from Marnix "Cubehamster" Licht, a puzzle designer whose credits include other portal- and perspective-based games, which lines up with previews describing Nomori's puzzle logic as clear and fair rather than obtuse. A hands-on preview from GDC 2026 summarized the feel of the game as "what you get when you make Portal cozy" — there is no failure penalty for experimenting with a portal placement, so players are encouraged to test ideas freely rather than memorize a single solution.
6. Meet Kiko, Yuki, and the Spirit World's Residents
Alongside Kiko, the marketing screenshots highlight a recurring companion spirit nicknamed Yuki, which can be sent ahead or recalled with a dedicated button prompt, and a jelly-like creature called Slimebun that players can temporarily take direct control of to reach spaces Kiko cannot fit into herself. Enchanted Works has framed these companions as puzzle tools as much as characters — each one unlocks a new interaction type as the story introduces it, rather than existing purely for flavor.
7. From a Free Prologue to a Gamescom Award to Full Release
Nomori has had an unusually long and visible road to launch for a small indie project. The concept first won The Big Indie Pitch at Gamescom 2022, and Enchanted Works followed that up by releasing Nomori: Prologue as a free, four-level Early Access demo the same year to gather feedback on the rotate-and-portal mechanics before building the full game around them. The studio has continued to show the game at industry events since, including a gameplay showcase and hands-on sessions at GDC 2026, before finally locking in the September 23, 2026 release date this year.
That slow-build approach is worth knowing if you plan to jump in day one: the mechanics you will meet in the opening domain have effectively been public and iterated on for several years, which is part of why early hands-on previews describe the puzzle logic as unusually polished for a first full release from a six-person studio.
8. Should You Add Nomori to Your Wishlist?
If you enjoyed the portal logic of games like our Escape Simulator 2 beginner's guide covers, or you are already tracking Escape Academy 2's Back 2 School expansion, Nomori is aimed at a similar audience but trades escape-room tension for a slower, more exploratory pace. It sits closer to the puzzle-platformer side of the genre than a traditional room escape, closer in spirit to the kind of spatial-reasoning puzzles found in Escape Room: Grim of Legacy's puzzle rooms, just without a timer or a "trapped" premise.
At $19.99 for a four-domain, 40-plus-island campaign with no microtransactions mentioned anywhere in the official materials, it is a reasonably low-risk pickup for anyone who likes puzzle games with a gentle difficulty curve and a cozy, storybook tone.
Quick Recap
- Nomori launches September 23, 2026 on PC (Steam, Microsoft Store), Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One.
- Price is confirmed at $19.99 USD / €17.99 EUR, with no deluxe edition or DLC announced yet.
- Gameplay is built around placing and rotating portals to change gravity and perspective, later combined with time-recording puzzles.
- The story follows Kiko across four spirit-world domains, aided by companions Yuki and Slimebun.
- A free demo, Nomori: Prologue, has been playable on Steam since 2022 for anyone who wants to try the core mechanics first.
- The project won The Big Indie Pitch at Gamescom 2022 and was shown again at GDC 2026 ahead of launch.
Official Resources
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