Page - 167 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

Kathrin Trattner Game Review PAMALI: INDONESIAN FOLKLORE HORROR StoryTale Studios, Point-and-Click Horror, ID 2018 In indie and mainstream popular culture alike, Asian horror has been gaining world- wide recognition for quite some time. The most widely known digital cultural goods are produced in Japan and South Korea. However, as a Google search demon- strates, the global popularity of Indonesian horror narratives has also seen a sharp increase despite their being less broadly disseminated. For example, the number of Indonesian horror titles on Netflix is striking. Interestingly, the majority of those sto- ries draw on and incorporate the country’s rich folk traditions. Thus, tradition in its plural meaning is absolutely key here: with its diverse ethnic groups, languages, and religious traditions, Indonesia is anything but culturally homogenous. This cultural plurality is often depicted in Indonesian horror tales just as they are deeply embed- ded in Indonesian everyday life and its practices. In fact, the remarkable proximity of horror and the seemingly mundane is the basic premise of Pamali, an Indonesian folklore horror game. The first-person point-and-click horror game was (and is still being) developed by StoryTale Studios, a small indie studio based in Bandung, Indo- nesia.1 As Mira Wardhaningsih, co-creator of Pamali, explains in an interview, one of the intentions in creating the game was to introduce international audiences to a distinctively Indonesian approach to horror. As she elaborates: We believe that every culture has a different perception towards horror. […] In Indonesia, it’s not a big, catastrophic, one-time phenomenon that is terrifying; it is something else, something closer. We are scared of our ghosts, of our mon- sters, our spirits, because we can actually meet them at any time, for they are closely related to our own daily lives.2 Strictly speaking, Pamali is an anthology game: it is divided into four episodes, two of which have been released since late 2018 with two more in development. Each 1 Trattner 2019, 117. 2 Trattner 2019, 122. DOI: 10.25364/05.06:2020.1.11 166 | Kathrin Trattner www.jrfm.eu 2019, 6/1, 166–171