Virtual SEA
Games and Gaming from Southeast Asia
Gambir Studio recently completed the development of their mobile horror game in collaboration with Indonesian cosplayer Lola Zieta. Are you curious about the quality of this unlikely cooperation? Check out the following review!
CryoFall is a 2D survival game by AtomicTorch Studio (Singapore) out on Early Access, where you and a few dozen other humans crash land into an alien world and attempt to rebuild civilization. The scope of this game is honestly quite impressive coming from the perspective of someone new to survival games. The Tech Tree alone goes from building simple campfires to rolling through the alien world in full on power armor toting sci-fi weaponry, and the game apparently boasts the ability to be able to form entire cities with a working currency. The latter part, I, unfortunately, have not yet seen, mostly due to the small number of players in the servers who all who haven’t exactly made efforts to be friendly.
As part of the Berlin gamesweek, this year’s A MAZE festival opened its doors from April 10 to 13 to present talks, workshops and exhibitions from the field of art and culture and playful media. Being the Gamescom’s little artsy-fartsy sister, inclined visitors had the chance to experience mind-blowing VR installations, crazy indie games and other media that go way beyond mainstream gaming. Main topics were inclusion, politics, playfulness, and experimental visuals – all of it with a great and wide international focus
Transferring own biographies and emotional experiences into videogames has been a hit and miss so far. One of the challenges is to make the story fit with the gameplay. We can often discover a discrepancy between both parts, leaving the narrative and the interactive elements in dissonance. With “She Remembered Caterpillars”, we see another attempt to link the heartbreaking testimony of Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw with a clever puzzle mechanic. Does it succeed to deliver a satisfying union?
When you browse the Steam catalogue, especially the “indie section”, you’ll get quickly overwhelmed by the number of roguelikes available. As another game in that genre, is Dungeon Souls from the Philippines really worth your time?
Waker is minimalism. This shoot’em-up comes with clear and simple graphics and basically consists of lines and lights of various colors. Players control a vessel, try to dodge millions of projectiles while shooting the “enemy”. To do so, it isn’t simply enough to spam the shoot button, but players must target their foes until the weapon lock-on is activated.
If you have been playing videogames for a while, you will undoubtedly encounter a certain fatigue either of recurring gameplay or – as in the author’s case – of uninspired recycling of settings, topics or locations. Is seems like the videogames industry is repeatedly offering the same experiences inspired by either North American or Japanese cultures and regions. Here at Virtual SEA, we strongly believe that game developers from under-represented areas of world such as Southeast Asia can offer new and refreshing ideas to videogames. Can She & The LightBearer from Indonesian studio Mojiken satisfy this expectation?
Gambir Studio recently completed the development of their mobile horror game in collaboration with Indonesian cosplayer Lola Zieta. Are you curious about the quality of this unlikely cooperation? Check out the following review!
CryoFall is a 2D survival game by AtomicTorch Studio (Singapore) out on Early Access, where you and a few dozen other humans crash land into an alien world and attempt to rebuild civilization. The scope of this game is honestly quite impressive coming from the perspective of someone new to survival games. The Tech Tree alone goes from building simple campfires to rolling through the alien world in full on power armor toting sci-fi weaponry, and the game apparently boasts the ability to be able to form entire cities with a working currency. The latter part, I, unfortunately, have not yet seen, mostly due to the small number of players in the servers who all who haven’t exactly made efforts to be friendly.
As part of the Berlin gamesweek, this year’s A MAZE festival opened its doors from April 10 to 13 to present talks, workshops and exhibitions from the field of art and culture and playful media. Being the Gamescom’s little artsy-fartsy sister, inclined visitors had the chance to experience mind-blowing VR installations, crazy indie games and other media that go way beyond mainstream gaming. Main topics were inclusion, politics, playfulness, and experimental visuals – all of it with a great and wide international focus
Transferring own biographies and emotional experiences into videogames has been a hit and miss so far. One of the challenges is to make the story fit with the gameplay. We can often discover a discrepancy between both parts, leaving the narrative and the interactive elements in dissonance. With “She Remembered Caterpillars”, we see another attempt to link the heartbreaking testimony of Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw with a clever puzzle mechanic. Does it succeed to deliver a satisfying union?
When you browse the Steam catalogue, especially the “indie section”, you’ll get quickly overwhelmed by the number of roguelikes available. As another game in that genre, is Dungeon Souls from the Philippines really worth your time?
Waker is minimalism. This shoot’em-up comes with clear and simple graphics and basically consists of lines and lights of various colors. Players control a vessel, try to dodge millions of projectiles while shooting the “enemy”. To do so, it isn’t simply enough to spam the shoot button, but players must target their foes until the weapon lock-on is activated.
If you have been playing videogames for a while, you will undoubtedly encounter a certain fatigue either of recurring gameplay or – as in the author’s case – of uninspired recycling of settings, topics or locations. Is seems like the videogames industry is repeatedly offering the same experiences inspired by either North American or Japanese cultures and regions. Here at Virtual SEA, we strongly believe that game developers from under-represented areas of world such as Southeast Asia can offer new and refreshing ideas to videogames. Can She & The LightBearer from Indonesian studio Mojiken satisfy this expectation?
Pamali, which means abstinence, prohibition or things that should not be done at a certain place or time because they can cause evil.
Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! Is already the fourth installment in this humorous management simulation series developed by Daylight Studios from Singapore. It is about time to check out what […]
Simulacra: Pipe Dreams is another found-phone-game and a successor to Simulacra as well as Sara Is Missing from Kaigan Games. All games have in common that they simulate a phone in your phone. This idea, which can also be found in several other mobile games like A Normal Lost Phone, helps to get more involved into the game – the immersion rises. So, also this spin-off of Simulacra feels and behaves like a phone of a nameless person or like “your” phone.
There are a few moments most people never forget in their lives. The first day in a new school is possibly one of them – for the best or the […]
In Cinema 14, players take over the role of a girl falling asleep during a show and awakening being trapped in a deserted movie theater. By choosing the seat of a long-lost child, she unknowingly triggered a deadly curse. Now, she needs to unravel the mysteries of the child’s fate, reconstruct the events and escape the cinema. Since the game is made in Malaysia it features many references to Malaysian cultures and mythologies, which adds a nice touch to an otherwise interesting but common storyline.
Bayani is a fighting game on a 2D plane with 3D environments, similar to the latest Street Fighter games. It features 8 fighters that are fantasy re-imaginations of heroes and heroines from the Philippines such as writer Jose Rizal or revolutionary Gregoria Alvarez de Jesus. The battle arenas will be inspired by famous landmarks in the Philippines. But that’s not all: Filipino music, collectibles such as the book “Noli me tangere”, unlockable traditional costumes and of course background stories inspired by the history of the Philippines. Ranida Games wants to deliver a truly local game with a gameplay that can reach a global community of players.
Here at Virtual SEA, we are working hard to represent the vast diversity of Southeast Asian video game development. While we give our best at covering as many games as possible through in-deep reviewing, there are still a lot more games that just fall under the table due to simple lack of time and resources (not to mention each of our own piles of shame). Now we want to give credit to all those little gems we played only for too little time to craft a proper review, but which still deserve your attention. This time, we present to you indie games from Singapore and Indonesia. Go and give these games a chance!
Fans of classic horror movies and geek culture should listen up: Streets of Red: Devil’s Dare Deluxe (DDD) is a multiplayer beat’em up full of parodic references to horror classics and arcade style gaming. With its retro style presentation and unforgiving permadeath gameplay, Singaporean developer Secret Base wants to revive memories of old school arcade brawler sessions.
Who’s the main protagonist in the Harry Potter universe? Harry himself may be a good guess, he-who-must-not-be-named would make the best antagonist. Honestly, isn’t Hogwarts, the magical school, and home to all of Harry’s adventures the secret star? A school for magical kids with secrets everywhere, astonishing architecture and a curriculum that makes every other study look like boring chores. And then Hogwarts is lead by one of the most characteristic figures of all time: Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts. Ever since, players all around the world have been waiting to become the head of magical school themselves. And here comes “Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story” to fill this gap.
