Games and Gaming from Southeast Asia
Sometimes it’s only short moments that have a big impact: When The Past Is Around is just a short game, but rarely has the experience been so impressive and emotional. This point ‘n click adventure by Mojiken Studio from Indonesia tells a story about love, loss, pain, and moving on, which doesn’t get lost in depression but also manages to remember and celebrate the beautiful things in life.
We particularly liked two aspects about Short Creepy Tales: 7PM: The setting and the visual design. In addition, 7PM is an exciting, albeit very short, horror adventure that shows the potential that lies dormant in games with unused scenarios and creative design decisions outside the mainstream.
In Stagehands! we take on the tasks of a backstage crew in the film or theater business. Our job is to prepare the stage for the production. This works best with teamwork and so Stagehands! Will be a co-op game for 2 to 4 players in local and online mode. Together we create backdrops, put the scenes in the right light, and move stage elements to their correct place – always with a wicked timer ticking down!
Waking up and leaving the house is just the beginning of the nightmare the player goes through in A Day Without Me, the debut of Gamecom Team. You get out of bed and must find out about your existence in an empty, chaotic neighborhood. Following a vibrating noise through the doors of your house and after finally switching it off, you’ll find yourself in front of a demonic ritual circle. The other doors are locked, protected by devils’ faces on the door plate. What the heck is going on…?
The buns are ready! After some development time and a successful Kickstarter call Bake ‘n Switch was finally released for the PC on Steam. Can the cute co-op scuffle from Malaysia meet the high expectations?
Did you think this was one of those games that would be stuck forever in the Early Access nimbus and then be silently released at some point? Well, you were dead wrong! Instead, developer Toge Productions and publisher Modern Wolf have followed a stringent plan and now officially released their game Necronator: Dead Wrong after only 5 months of Early Access. Is this version any good now and is the project really finished? Let’s find out!
Imagine living in a world where people who have sex without loving each other go up in flames. What will happen to our relationships? The narrative adventure Fires At Midnight gets to the bottom of this question and sends us through a thrilling fever dream in the life of a young couple against the backdrop of the turn of the millennium in Malaysia.
Due to this year’s pandemic, many gaming events had to be canceled or replaced by online presentations. Therefore, probably more game developers than ever decided to contribute playable versions of their PC games to The Steam Game Festival – Summer Edition 2020. In addition to live streams and Q&As with the developers, the hands-on experience is the main focus of this event. Fortunately, there are also many titles from Southeast Asia, for example from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam. So that you don’t lose track of all those games, we have this list of 15+1 game demos from Southeast Asia that you can try out from home and for free between June 16, 2020 (10 AM PDT) and June 22, 2020 (10 AM PDT).
Flickering neon lights. Skyscrapers wherever you look. This city is sinking into a swamp of crime and violence. Right in the middle stands a young woman with colored hair. Pumping electro beat. Slash! Before you know it, a room full of corpses. Welcome to Lithium City. This game feels like a fever dream: confusing, sweat inducing, overwhelming with stimuli and yet somehow gripping. Lithium City manages to combine fun and frustration like no other game without forcing you to put that gamepad down for good if you take the challenge.
We don’t know much about PRETA แดนมรณะ yet, a game made by the Thai studio 7Evil, but the first trailer already gives us hope for an exciting horror survival adventure. The mix of story and short gameplay is visually impressive because the graphics are driven by the powerful Unreal Engine.
A young girl wakes up in her bed. Is she in a hospital? She leaves the room and we quickly notice that something is wrong here. Clinically clean environments, strange machines and dangerous robots on patrol. What is going on here? Let’s leave this unpleasant environment as soon as possible! In Timelie, the first game by Thai studio Urnique, we are looking for a way out and how to get there is the puzzle we have to solve. Fortunately, time is on our side!
Ciel Fledge, the latest game by the Indonesian developer Studio Namaapa, offers the unique opportunity to raise a daughter without having to ruin a real person’s life. As a cross between visual novel, match-3 mini-games and simulation, the game allows you to extensively manage your new kid’s activities and influence the career path she will take. Let’s take a deeper dive into the game and see how this mix plays out.
In their childhood days, who hasn’t dreamed of traveling the world as a super detective and chasing bad guys? It was the same with Mark Fillon of General Interactive from Singapore and his dream came true when he first played “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” In the early 90s. Now, many years later, he would like to revive this feeling and create a spiritual successor with Chinatown Detective Agency. You can now support Mark and his international team with this project on Kickstarter. We took a closer look at the alpha demo on the game, so that you know what you’re getting into.
Is a good thing worth waiting for? When the Kickstarter campaign for Graywalkers: Purgatory started in September 2014, no one expected the ambitious project would have to face such an odyssey. The first release was announced for 2017, but the game never came out. A good six years after the crowdfunding campaign, the first official version of the post-apocalyptic turn-based role-playing game was finally released in Steam’s Early Access program. We have taken a closer look at Graywalkers: Purgatory and will tell you whether the project has arrived where it was supposed to go.
What are we afraid of? This is a question every game developer has to ask himself if he wants to make a horror game. For everyone, fear and creep means something different. Popular horror games usually include the elements of terror, psychological horror, and the body horror of blood and intestines. DreadOut2 from Indonesian studio Digital Happiness serves us a splendid horror cocktail that contains all of these elements. However, one thing is decidedly different: it is a thoroughly Indonesian horror game.
The big challenge with most management games is the difficulty that comes with the act of making busywork, fulfilling orders, and organizing tasks engaging gameplay. Some games push your micromanagement skills to the limit, placing you on crazy strict timers. Others allow for some wacky setups, using the comedic power of a roller coaster that launches people into space to keep its players invested.
