The Coolest Games From Indie Jam 2024

The folks at The Magic Rain has hosted its second Indie Jam event, a community-driven celebration of the burgeoning indie game development scene in Malaysia and the larger Southeast Asian region.

24 games by developers in Malaysia and Indonesia attended, showcasing playable demos at Xsolla Curine Academy, KL Eco City, Kuala Lumpur where attendees can discover and try them out. Some are games make their second appearance (like Weyrdlets and Kooeh, which are certified cool games), others still using a lot of placeholder assets, so we got an early look at games that are in the initial stages of the development.

Here are some of the highlights of the games we get to go hands-on of:

The Chef’s Shift

Mavis Beacon may have taught us typing, but she sure didn’t teach us how to run an Italian restaurant.

By Panitia GameDev, The Chef’s Shift combines the hecticness of a hands-on restaurant game where you cook and serve dishes, and making it even more high pressure by making you type words to complete any action. Use the coffee machine? Type a word. Pour said coffee into a cup? Type another word. Serve it to a customer? Type another word. Gun down a rat so that it stops stealing your food in the inventory which you typed a whole word for? Type a word.

For typists who wished for a game that feels like Typing Of The Dead but not as brain-dead linear. You simply cannot type just any word you see on the screen of The Chef’s Shift, and that’s the new thing it brings to the typewriter’s table. Let the developers cook.

Coming to PC (Steam)

Duo Quest

A co-op card game where both players are sitting on the same side of the table to defeat a monster. The twist? For every card being played, players must answer the question with the same answer for it to be activated.

Developed by 1+1 Studios, it’s a good tool for icebreakers and getting to know acquaintances, or put to the test how well you know your best friend or romantic partner. This card game can make or break relationships.

1+1 Studios’ website

Hikayat Pak Ya

A UOWM student game developed by Walking Fish Studio, the tale of old crocodile man named Pak Ya (the Malay word for crocodile is “buaya”) and a kid sitting inside the backpack Banjo-Kazooie style, is built on a niche, yet really funny, premise.

Hikayat Pak Ya is set in a post-apocalypse SS15 where it’s infested with rats of all sizes. Smol rats. Big rats. Big rats where smol rats ride on them as cavalry. Warhammer has nothing on these rats.

No signs of the giant rat that makes all of the rules, but for Malaysians who know the lore and reputation of this particular district in Subang Jaya, it’s a strong premise for a 2D Metroidvania.

Sticker Delight

Developed by Indonesia-based Dawn Sky, Sticker Delight is part-visual novel, part-puzzle game and wholefully wholesome. It’s premise is simple, gather your family and friends and have dinner, and you’ll be interacting with the game like it’s an interactive sticker book. Every puzzle piece is a sticker.

This slice-of-life of Southeast Asian culture is short, and won’t be interesting for sticklers for deep, complex gameplay. But the cute, delightful vibes it projects is a wonderful new lense to experience culture from this part of the world.

Coming to PC (Steam).

Project Descent

Developed by Kotakoren Games, Project Descent is a dungeon crawler that goes through family generations. You descend down dungeons, and have descendants ready to take on the job to replace the current party members.

Sounds very Massive Chalice at first, but Project Descent’s combat, playable at the show floor, is not all a strategy tactics game. Rather, it has real-time with pause combat ala Pathfinder, Total War and other CRPG and RTS games. Micromanaging movements, aggroing the right enemy and flanking are all part of the game’s core combat.

This has the makings of a fantastic game for freaks (affectionately), in particular folks who love CRPGs.

Mindslayer

Another UOWM student game, this one by the team at Kolo Me Studio. A first-person shooter inspired by the new wave of boomer shooters (Ultrakill was mentioned), as player descend into the minds of another person and slay their nightmares.

A game that knows what it wants to be, the traversal movement is just right based on our impressions with the early build the team showcased, but hopefully it can do more as the sea is now full of competent boom-shoots.

The Student Game Jam Games

We managed to take a quick look at some of the Student Game Jams’s games. The seven teams had about five days to complete a game from scratch, with the theme being “light”.

One of the popular games was a 2D platformer where you can change phases to make platforms appear or disappear, to the point that we saw people attempting speedruns. Another was a tower defense game with purposely low-poly graphics rendering but high-art, fantastical models. And another was an experimental horror game where you play as a kid seated in the back of a car and ghosts are haunting you. Check out The Magic Rain has more details on how it all went.

Indie Jam 2024 is growing ever bigger, the demos were quickly overrun by crowds, and with two days full of industry panel talks (the panel by Metronomik’s Wan Hazmer seems to attract the most crowd).

The Magic Rain confirmed that Indie Jam will return next year, with an earlier date sometime in Q2 2025.

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