Horror video game with ghosts, demons from Indonesian folklore an international hit for indie studio
- Downloaded 2.5 million times, DreadOut has brought fame to gaming studio Digital Happiness, one of few game developers in the Southeast Asian country
- The spooky game racked up US$3-4 million in sales, was adapted for the cinema, and has spawned a sequel, DreadOut 2
Kuntilanak, a long-haired, pale-faced woman with staring eyes, is peering from the shadows. Babi ngepet, a black-magic boar demon, snarls before a bloody attack. The pocong, a white-shrouded corpse, is coming closer and closer. These macabre characters are among the ghosts waiting for players of the video game DreadOut.
Grotesque and haunting, DreadOut has made Indonesian independent gaming studio Digital Happiness one of the Southeast Asian nation’s few game developers to find international success, reeling in US$3 million to US$4 million in sales and landing a movie adaptation from a big-time Indonesian film director.
The game was Digital Happiness’ first major project, and the studio now hopes to expand globally with a newly released sequel. After all, it has scary ghosts on its side.
“Our local ghosts are not only unknown [and therefore mysterious], but they are scarier than your Slenderman,” says Digital Happiness founder Rachmad Imron, 39, half-jokingly, referring to the faceless supernatural being born in the English-speaking realms of the internet.
DreadOut’s narrative theme is typical of horror fiction. A group of high-school students go on a trip, get lost, and wind up in a mysteriously empty old town. They find themselves in a school where the protagonist, Linda, begins running into ghosts and using her smartphone camera to fight them off.
The goal of the game, played largely in the third person, looking over Linda’s shoulder, is to capture as much information as possible about the ghosts and solve the mystery of the town’s haunted history.
