Tukoni: Forest Keepers brings Oksana Bula's books to Steam

Most book-to-game adaptations treat the author as a licensing line. Tukoni: Forest Keepers, out August 17 on Steam and the Epic Games Store, runs the arrangement the other way around: Oksana Bula, the Ukrainian illustrator whose Tukoni picture books began this universe in 2016, serves as the game's art director, drawing source imagery and steering the visual team at Kyiv studio Dream Operator. The adaptation is built around the person who draws the world, not around the rights to it.

You play the Traveller, a forest spirit helping the woods prepare for winter, and the story unfolds without a single written word—everything arrives as animation, gesture and hand-drawn pictograms, which makes the game playable in any language at once. That is a pointed inversion for a book series that had to be translated into French, Spanish, Vietnamese and German one edition at a time. We made the case for wordless play back in 2016 with Pan-Pan; Bula's forest makes the same argument in warmer colors, trusting the drawing to carry what dialogue usually does.

The credentials hold up. The free Tukoni: Prologue (2020) sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, and the full game took Excellence in Visual Art at the DevGAMM Awards 2025, whose jury singled out its layered hand-drawn textures. The studio counted more than 86,000 wishlists before launch. It costs $9.99, with a 25 percent launch discount running through the end of August, and the demo is still up if you want to see how much a game can say while saying nothing. There is a launch trailer if the demo is one step too many.