Games and Gaming from Southeast Asia
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.
Regular customer Freya has a writer’s block. Succubus Lua and the Elf Baileys are unhappily in love. Mermaid Aqua struggles with her self-esteem. These are just a few examples of the characters and stories that play an important role in Coffee Talk. As the owner of a small café that only opens at night, we listen to the stories of our guests, brew the right hot drink and take part in their fate. Coffee Talk is a spectacle of the mundane, a refuge from everyday life – and enchanted us with its warmth.
At the end of our series of the most anticipated games 2020, we are going to Thailand. Here are three indie highlights that could not be more different. Here’s why think you should look out for Gunman and The Witch, Timelie and The Last Bug this year.
What games can we expect from the Southeast Asian metropolis of Singapore in 2020? In addition to many new titles from aspiring solo developers and studios, we also note continuity and progress, because some developers have been routinely publishing high-quality games for years. With gamescom asia, Singapore is finally getting a games convention of international format – the perfect stage for game developers from Singapore and all of Southeast Asia. You can read which games we think are particularly noteworthy now.
It’s clear that inspiration for this game was the popular platform adventure Limbo. But unlike its role model, Incubo fails to achieve its brilliance. Too immature are the mechanics, too dirty the programming and too simple the style. Nevertheless, Incubo is perfect for those who are not afraid of any challenge and are interested in scary stories outside the mainstream.
Actually, Virtual SEA is indeed a platform for games from Southeast Asia. Rarely enough, however, Southeast Asia is used as a venue for games from other regions. The British studio Cloak and Dagger Games dares to leave well-known settings and publishes with Sumatra – Fate of Yandi a point’n click adventure set in Indonesia. We would like to take this opportunity to take a closer look at the game.
