Motte Island review: an Indonesian indie horror adventure

Prefer to watch rather than read? Check out our video review of Motte Island right here.

When it comes to indie PC games, the Asian scene is still in its infancy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t worthwhile indie games to be found out there. And Indonesian indie devs seem to be carving out a niche for themselves as a great source of indie horror games. There’s the upcoming Dreadout, of course, which has made waves internationally, but I just played another Indonesian indie horror game that has just been released: Motte Island.

(See: Scaring myself silly with the Dreadout demo)

Motte Island is a PC game from Indonesian indie outfit One Aperture, and it’ll run you just $4.99 on Gamersgate or Desura (the game is also on Steam Greenlight and you should vote for it). In the game, you play a convicted murderer returning to his island home to try to rescue his sister from sinister, and somewhat mysterious forces. As they often do in horror games, things go from bad to worse pretty much the moment you arrive.

Gameplay

Motte Island is a 2D, top-down action/adventure hybrid. When you’re fighting, it’s quite a bit like Hotline Miami: you can run around pretty fast and smash enemies with a wide variety of melee weapons and (eventually) a gun. Getting enemies from behind is vastly preferable to taking them head-on, as hitting anything from behind is a one-hit kill, whereas attacking most things from the front can become a more protracted (if frenzied) engagement. It’s also more satisfying, because a from-the-back attack comes with a sickening crunch as your foe falls to the ground a bloody mess.

Generally speaking, though, you can also just run away from enemies if you don’t feel like engaging with them.

In between the bloody melees, you’ll spend a lot of time playing Motte Island more like a traditional adventure game. To move the story along and unravel the mystery of what has your sister and how you can save her, you’ll need to talk to a variety of people across the island and find all kinds of things. You’ll spend a lot of your in-game time shining your flashlight around Motte Island’s dark environments, searching for the item you need to move forward.

Motte Island doesn’t give you much in the way of cues, and there’s also no map, so finding items and figuring out where to go next can sometimes get frustrating. That may be intentional—it makes sense the developers would want you to feel lost and confused at times in a game like this—but on a couple occasions, I found it was a bit much. Some of the items are also a little small, meaning that it’s easy to walk past them a few times before you actually realize they’re there.