Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror has a lot of really cool ideas. Some of them I think are really interesting on paper, but don't work well in practice. Others I think were just poorly executed. At the end of the day, I think there are a lot of concepts here that were really cool to see, but with few exceptions, the game simply isn't very enjoyable.

Pamali has a really unqiue format. There is a sort of "hub" where you walk around a very small house with a computer and a bunch of research notes, books, and a corkboard. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is actually supposed to be rather meta and is an approximate re-creation of the developer's actual game dev pad. If you log into the computer, you can see emails from people who have played the game and their thoughts on how good/bad it is, how it was scary, or how it incorporated interesting bits of folklore. I'm not sure if these are real emails they received, but it was kind of clever idea and suggests that a good deal of research was put into designing the scenarios with the various research correspondence and such. From the computer, you can select different documents which are supposed to be files on the different folklore stories incorporated in the game, which of course is how you start to play the different episodic standalone scenarios.

As that structure might indicate, this game is pretty different in a lot of ways. The horror is mostly tuned down from a lot of other indie horror titles, but perhaps most interestingly, there is a significant focus on authentically adapting real Indonesian folklore (thus the game's title). Since I in part approached this title with the specific intent to immerse myself in distinctly Indonesian horror tales, this was definitely an appeal for me that the game delivered on. The different scenarios are also packed full of little cultural items and descriptions for objects that I've never even heard of. While honestly it was to the point of being annoyingly repetitive, you can also interact and get a description of SO many objects in the game, sometimes in the character's voice. The scenery is also full of more traditional Indonesian style houses and the lush vegetation of the region. I can't really speak for how authentic the look is but given the attention to authenticity otherwise, I expect they know what they're doing. The graphics are about standard for modern indie horror, better than you might expect from a lower budget, if not amazing. But the game does have a very unique feel from its setting that you won't find in a lot of other games on Steam. One caveat though is that you should absolutely max the brightness setting asap. When I first started the game, I couldn't even see much just trying to get to the computer to start the actual game. Even at max brightness (which all the screenshots herein have), it's still a quite dark game at times.

The other most unique aspect of Pamali is that it features a ton of endings. I've never seen so many endings for any game. On Steam there are 117 achievements available and only a handful are just basic progression (like complete act I), the rest are endings. The first three scenarios each have around 30+ different endings and the last one has 16. This is a really cool idea, but honestly, as you might expect, the various "endings" are really not all that intriguing. Basically any kind of death is considered an ending, whether it's failing to hit all the QTEs or making a silly decision, you'll get an ending if it was a unique death or just an ending particular to failure at that point in the game. The endings themselves are never cinematic (unsurprisingly), and are just a page of text explaining what happened. While more could be done for this, I do think this was a cool idea that is at least more interesting than a Game Over screen, despite how whatever so many endings were.

Below, I will give my brief impression of the different scenarios since that's the bulk of the game and they each vary (sometimes, like the last one, to the point of feeling like a totally different game). Unsurprisingly when I first booted up the game, I found the whole metanarrative in the developers' apartment really confusing and accordingly didn't totally understand how to get to the scenarios or which was first, so I ended up playing The Hungry Witch first. These scenarios are all unrelated and standalone so that's not a problem from a story perspective, but, as my individual mini-reviews will indicate, this also means I played what was far and away the best scenario first. After that and once I realized how it worked, I played the others in release order, which is how I would've gone about it normally. Each scenario takes about 1-2 hours and is pretty digestible in one sitting.

The White Lady ★

I found this to be easily the worst scenario of the bunch, which is unsurprising given that it's the first one made, but it is the best example of an idea that sounds kind of interesting but is bad in execution...and the game just leans into it. In The White Lady you play as a man named Jaka who has inherited his family home which he needs to clean up for resale. Jaka also remembers growing up that they used to think there was a ghost in the house. While you complete cleaning tasks—that somehow manage to be more tedious than irl cleaning—around the house, you'll be haunted by an apparition. This idea does sound a little interesting and maybe could work, but if it could, Pamali goes about it all wrong. The tedium of the cleaning is absurd and there is so much of it. Further, the ghost almost never appears. It is no exaggeration to say that if you try to do one of the longer endings possible, you will spend a good 95% of your time cleaning (which is basically clicking on a spot and moving the mouse around) and the ghost may show up fewer than ten times over an hour or two. It's just super boring and barely feels like a horror game. In fact, I played this one over stream to a couple friends and felt the need to apologize afterward for how boring it was.

There is a bit of the cultural immersion I'm here for with numerous folk spiritual and religious objects around the house, but not enough to keep my interest when I found the "gameplay" so dull. I reserve 1-star ratings for games I regret playing and this scenario hits that mark exactly. This scenario has 35 endings and considering how many will require you to do all the cleaning again, I can't imagine actually doing that. Separately though, the title is a little funny.

The Tied Corpse ★★

In case you're having trouble reading the text, it says, "Awww, you must be so tireeed :( I'm sowwy I can't be there with you :(" and I would really hate if you missed out on that.

This one I think is barely 2 stars. You are a gravekeeper having to do your job around the graveyard going into the night while various hauntings appear. Honestly, this really just feels like a variation on the previous game of "do menial work while ghosts (very) occasionally appear." Most of what you're doing is looking for certain plots that need watering (it is mandated that these graves have grass growing on them) or digging (I'm not sure why you need to partially dig up the occupied graves). The spooky atmosphere of the foggy graveyard in the evening/night was a bit more evocative than the house of the first scenario. It's not without its own unique annoyances though. It takes place in 2007 and you have an ugly old cellphone to show for it that is frustrating to navigate and constantly goes off while you're playing. Further, only certain plots require attention but the map to determine which ones they are is very confusing. Thankfully, you're not just cleaning the whole time. But this one definitely still gets tedious and once again, the hauntings are so rare, it barely feels like a horror game. The spooky atmosphere just barely pushes this one beyond the "I regret playing it" level, if not by much. I ultimately died by finding a random grave out in a hidden grove, digging it up, and choosing to sleep in it, which for some reason was an option I had, but while I was pretty sure it would kill me when I did it, I'd had enough anyway so I didn't mind.

The Little Devil ★★

While this one gets the same rating as the last one, it's a much better 2 star at least and while I didn't think it was great, I feel like this is the point the game started to hit its stride. You play as a woman who, in trying to afford her father's medical bills, has decided to head to her deceased grandfather's house to pawn off some stuff so he doesn't have to leave the hospital and die. Wow, who knew I'd find such a relatable American tale in an Indonesian game! Of course, the house is haunted. But it's also full of keys, locked doors, and secrets leading to rituals and cursed objects. I got a few endings without uncovering nearly all of the secrets, but there was actually a pretty interesting breadcrumb trail leading toward several artifacts in need of cleansing to purge some kind of monster that is plaguing your family (perhaps responsible for your grandfather's death and your father's illness?). Again, hauntings are somewhat rare and the game feels more like a mildly spooky puzzle game than horror, but at least this time, it works a little. There is a time limit for when the pawn shop closes that you don't get definitive cues for and it felt overly strict unless you know exactly what you're doing. I liked the aesthetics more in this one than the previous two, the outdoors especially features some interesting landscape, even if you don't explore it much. But overall, despite the improvements, I still wouldn't consider this scenario "great," it just had more potential.

The Hungry Witch ★★★★

This scenario I actually thought was pretty neat and is definitely the gem of the group. You play as a pregnant woman coming home to her mother in Bali only to discover that the grounds are being haunted by a witch who hungers for your unborn baby. The aesthetics of this scenario are quite gorgeous as your home is a compound residence made up of several buildings connected by a garden-like courtyard and lots of interesting vegetation and stylish houses that really establish the setting. The monster, the Leak, is way more present in this scenario and you feel constant tension through most sections of the game. There is some lore that deepens your personal connection to the events even beyond the initial hook of being in danger. There are a number of more "action" sequences that in some ways were welcome, but also boiled down to kind of janky QTEs that could lead to frustrating deaths. Thankfully one of the biggest improvements of this scenario is that there are a number of checkpoints for different "acts" so you don't have to replay the entire scenario every time you fail, like in the others. This was the most immersive scenario and also had the best story and the clearest lore. It does still have a segment I found rather slow and tedious with some confusing puzzles and a couple of the action sequences could be frustratingly demanding with the jank QTEs, so it's far from perfect. And admittedly, from a horror and gameplay perspective, I'd say it's only a little better than mediocre and more 3 stars. But the visuals and immersive lore and culture I found bumped it up further in a way it wasn't able to in the other scenarios.

In conclusion, I don't really overall recommend this game. It's a very cool idea and I think the meta-narrative aspect is super interesting. As well, the relative strength of the latest scenario shows me that the developer definitely has some chops that have significantly improved over time. If all the scenarios were up to the quality of The Hungry Witch it would've been a flawed but still quite cool experience all the way through. But there's so much holding the others back that it's hard to really feel positively about the game. In the end, I'm not sure if I'm happy I played the best scenario first. I might have never gotten to it if I'd played them in release order and gave up on the game, but I also feel like maybe that would've helped me cut my losses sooner and not push through the more boring scenarios with the hope they would be more on par with the last one.

This is a game I really wanted to like more than I did. So much about it I think is super cool and features ideas I want to see work. But when a game is just kind of boring and/or frustrating for most of the time, I have a hard time recommending it. Pamali isn't super expensive (about $5/scenario or $15 for a bundle of all 4) and I do think The Hungry Witch is worth playing since it doesn't do too much badly and is interesting, but I'd recommend skipping the rest, in which case it's not a great deal (I believe you still have to buy the base game/The White Lady to get The Hungry Witch). That said, if I hear the developer ever adds a fifth scenario, I might be interested in checking it out considering the significant steps forward evident in the periodic additions.