8 Incredible Southeast Asian Games from Malaysian Game Expo Level Up KL 2023

Bright stars from Malaysia.

Updated:

Oct 29, 2023 2:06 pm

Posted:

Oct 29, 2023 2:00 pm

Held annually in Kuala Lumpur, Level Up KL is a hub for the best games in the Southeast Asia region. Just like last year, this year’s event featured a wide variety of games from across the region, from shooters to puzzle platformers to boss battlers with a twist.

Here are eight of the best games from this year’s show.

Midwest 90: Rapid City

A restaurant tycoon game with a story focus and a survival twist, Midwest 90: Rapid City by Malaysian developer Hidden Chest Studio isn’t afraid to get weird. Open a restaurant in a pre-apocalyptic redneck backwater and serve meals to earn money – that much is straightforward enough. However, the Black Hills are infested with mysterious monsters, which are as delicious as they are destructive. Heading to the market for supplies means visiting a gruesome butcher who peddles in monster meat and unlocking new recipes to beef up your menu, while you can control everything from the placement of your restaurant’s tables to the price of the dishes. There’s even a morality system, whereby you can choose to serve nourishing meals for cheap, or exploit your customers with addictive, pricey food. The world looks suitably disgusting, while the food looks suitably delicious.

A demo is out now on Steam.

As I Began to Dream

As I Began to Dream is a puzzle-platformer from Indonesian developer Strayflux Studio, in which you control a young girl and her pet ghost-turtle as she makes her way through painterly environments by rearranging the scenery to reveal new paths forward. The mechanics are easy enough: large square blocks of scenery can be rotated or swapped, until they line up just right, and if the player character is standing on one of the blocks at the time, she’ll move with it too. Unlocking the critical path is one thing, but… You want to get all of those hard-to-reach collectibles too, right? With cute storybook visuals underpinned by a dark undertone as the girl is bereaved of her parents by shadowy monsters, As I Began to Dream is a deceptively deep and satisfying puzzler that I’m excited to play more of.

Unyielder

Drawing a crowd throughout the entirety of Level Up, Unyielder is a super-fast paced “movement FPS” in the vein of Doom and Titanfall, with its demo based around a series of hard-as-nails boss arenas. The game’s pace is aggressive and relentless, as each boss keeps the player feeling constantly harassed, forcing you to keep moving or die. Luckily you have an arsenal of cool weapons, from a shotgun to a rocket launcher, three of which you can carry and cycle between, and a selection of stylish moves such as slide and a boost. But the only way to recover health is to parry your enemy’s attacks, which is easier said than done. With sick visuals that are way beyond what you’d expect from an indie and panic-inducing sound design, Singapore developer Trueworld Games have an intriguing game on their hands. Look out for a demo coming soon.

Whisper Mountain Outbreak

Inspired by Resident Evil Outbreak, Capcom’s 2003 online co-op survivathon, Whisper Mountain Outbreak is a slick team-based zombie basher from Indonesia’s Toge Productions, helmed by the team behind Rising Hell. Traversing blood-soaked locations with an isometric view, a team of four players must work together to fend off the undead hordes and progress to freedom. Ammunition is limited, as is each player’s inventory: You get only four slots each, meaning players must work together to strategize and divvy up the essentials – you take the key, I’ll grab the grenades, and we’ll stash the treasure here for later – in order to make it out alive. The demo I played was for only two players, which severely limited what we could carry and made firefights tough, but with a full team of four it might be more manageable, and either way the teamwork element is super fun. A Steam demo is coming soon.

Robo Frenzy

A collaboration between Indonesian indie studios Yummy Yummy Tummy and Tamatin Entertainment, Robo Frenzy is another boss-battle focused game, but this time it has an attractive cartoon style with goofy robot bosses and mechanics that are not so much tower defense as tower offense. While dodging enemy attacks that sometimes border on bullet hell, one or two players must build their own weapons and gadgets to fight back. Farm resources around the map, build factories to turn them into projectiles, and then create devices such as cannons and flinging hands to fire these projectiles at the boss. The type of factories and the number of them you connect together will determine the types of ammo you make, and luring the boss into strategic positions increases the efficiency of your gadgets’ attacks. But those bosses sure do fight back, smashing up your creations and forcing you to constantly revise your plans.

A demo of this hectic but fun game is out now, but a full release is still some way off – it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Shunya

With a mix of pixelart graphics and manga-style illustrations, Shunya from Morleaf Studio in Malaysia is still a little rough around the edges, with its English script and dotty humor in particular need of polish. But looks can be deceiving, and once you get stuck in, Shunya is an engrossing puzzle platformer. The protagonist, Stacey, and her feline friend Mr Cat are together able to manipulate blocks of the terrain to dodge deadly obstacles, trigger switches and reach the end of each screen. While this may sound similar to As I Began to Dream, in practice it is quite different, as the player can draw climbable rectangles of any dimensions but with a limited total area; these shapes must also be placed within specified highlighted parts of the screen or they won’t be created. These restrictions still leave a lot of freedom to solve puzzles your own way, and sometimes the game tests your dexterity as well, forcing you to erase the block you’re standing on to create a new one, running and jumping to the new location or plummeting to failure. The stage I played featured earth blocks, but later stages have fire, wind and water, which look set to shake up the gameplay. And the story? Yeah, the story is wild.

A playable prototype is available here on Itch.io now.

Overhours

Essentially a tower defense game but playing like a third-person action game, Overhours is a fun if surprisingly complex title from Malaysia’s CtrlD Studio. In the demo, players are tasked with preventing successive waves of enemies from reaching the exit, building defenses between waves such as spiky floor traps and cannon towers. Once each wave starts, enemies will hopefully be obliterated by your traps. But similar to PixelJunk Monsters, the twist is that the player can also run around the map and directly kill enemies with a gun, to rack up funds to set more traps – like an isometric version of Orcs Must Die. Enemies will follow the player, sending them off their set course (where you probably laid your initial set of traps), leading to new layers of strategic play. And speaking of strategy, in addition to offensive traps you can also lay down sticky glue panels to slow down the faster baddies that spawn in later waves, and barricades to funnel the hordes where you want them. It’s a lot to juggle, and definitely not easy on a first attempt, but learning enemy behaviors and how to deal with them makes for a rewarding experience.

Sedap!

Winning Best Student Game at last week’s SEA Game Awards and drawing a crowd throughout Level Up, Sedap! is a fun take on the Overcooked-style kitchen party game genre by Singapore team Kopiforge that is targeting a 2025 release. Two players work together to prepare a selection of classic Southeast Asian dishes such as nasi lemak, pineapple fried rice and lotus tea, with one player designated chef – while the other tales the role of hunter. Yes, in Sedap! you have to hunt and kill the ingredients yourself. With something like a small chicken (for meat) or bee (for honey) it’s not so hard – a couple of whacks and you have your ingredients. But hilariously, some of the less obvious items such as pineapples and coconuts take the form of monsters, which require multiple hits and aggressively fight back. With an adorable visual style, a smart split-screen that changes dynamically the further the players venture apart, and a fun and frantic pace, Sedap! is already far better than a student project has any right to be, and it’s not even done yet.

An early demo is available now on Itch.io.

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