Short version: the first 5 of 36 levels, all five game modes, no sign-up, and an export button so nothing you learn is wasted.

Longer version below.

The five modes, all present

The demo isn’t a vertical slice of one mechanic — it’s the whole loop, early.

Story. Makiko narrates each level: where the band is, what went wrong, what you need to be able to read to fix it. Fully voiced intro, illustrated.

Quiz. The core drill. A handful of characters at a time, spaced so you meet each one again just before you’d forget it. Sessions are deliberately short — this is the mode you’d do on a train.

Rhythm. Characters scroll in time with the music and you read them on the beat. It sounds like a gimmick; it’s the mode that turns recognition into reflex, which is a different skill from recall.

Battle. A duel format with a timer. More pressure, less patience — it’s how you find out which kana you only think you know. ン and ソ will find you.

Stickers. A collection to fill as you progress, some rarer than others. Pure carrot, no apology.

What the demo deliberately holds back

Levels 6 to 36, the hiragana and kanji arcs, the later story, and the “street” finale where you read real Japanese signage with no training wheels. The demo build physically doesn’t contain those assets or that story text — we strip them at build time rather than lock them behind a flag, so there’s nothing to spoil and nothing to datamine.

Your progress isn’t trapped

At the end of the demo there’s an export button. It downloads your progress; the full app imports it. Five levels of work carries over.

Where to play it

• In your browser, right here on this page, or at katakana.rocks/demo
• Windows — installer or portable .exe
• macOS — universal, Apple Silicon and Intel
• Linux — x64 and ARM64 (does it runs on a Raspberry Pi? please tell me!)

The desktop builds are the same web demo wrapped in a locked portrait window — same content, but offline and without a browser tab.

One honest note

As a solo developer, generative AI tools were my only option to produce some of the artwork and background music, which I then carefully selected, edited, and assembled by hand. The story, the design, the code, and the teaching content are entirely human-written. There’s no AI running inside the game — nothing is generated while you play, and nothing you do is sent anywhere.

Tell us which kana you keep getting wrong. We’re collecting grudges. 🎸