2014 was quite the year for the student developers of Lurking, the first-person horror adventure from DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore that turns sounds into scares.
In addition to picking up multiple honors, including the “Best Student Game” award at the Independent Games Festival China, the game found an enormous global audience on YouTube as the subject of several “Let’s Play” videos, which invite viewers to share the experience of the game by watching a live or recorded playing session. One video of Lurking, created by popular YouTube host PewDiePie, has been viewed more than 4.1 million times since debuting in July.
This week, Tech in Asia included Lurking on its list of the best indie PC games developed in Asia, calling it “Singapore’s golden PC game for 2014.”
“The game gave people a shock right at the start and it got them hooked,” Dexter Chng Shi Rong, the game’s lead designer, said about the game’s success. “I think that would be what got us the awards.”
Since graduating this past spring, three of the game’s original developers — along with two other recent Singapore graduates — have gone on to start their own independent game company, GattaiGames. Together, they are working on a spiritual successor to Lurking.