Troublemaker

Troublemaker is a beat-em-up action-adventure developed by Gamecom Team, a small Indonesian studio, and it wears its inspirations openly. The game drops you into the chaotic hallways, courtyards, and back alleys of an Indonesian high school, casting you as a student who solves pretty much every social problem with his fists. If you grew up on Kunio-kun or River City Ransom, the DNA here will feel immediately familiar, but the setting and cultural texture give it a distinct personality that larger, better-funded games rarely bother with. The core loop is straightforward brawling: you move through environments, encounter rival gangs or school bullies, and beat them into the floor using punches, kicks, grabs, and a small roster of special moves. The combat has a satisfying weight to it without being deeply complex. It is not a game that asks you to master intricate combo systems, and that is honestly fine. The joy is in the rhythm of it, the school-uniform aesthetics, the Indonesian slang peppered through the dialogue, and the general sense that someone made this game because they genuinely wanted to tell this kind of story in this kind of place. That specificity is worth a lot. Where Troublemaker earns its Very Positive rating on Steam is largely in its atmosphere and its honesty about what it is. The pixel art is hand-crafted with obvious care. Environments feel lived-in, characters have personality sketched into their sprites, and the soundtrack leans into a local flavor that you will not hear in most Western indie brawlers. It is a short game, and it knows it. The pacing does not overstay its welcome, which for a brawler is genuinely hard to get right. Too many games in this genre pad their runtime with repetitive wave encounters until your hands go numb. Troublemaker mostly avoids that trap. The honest caveats: the combat depth ceiling is low, so players who want the mechanical density of something like Streets of Rage 4 will hit that ceiling quickly. The camera can feel a little cramped in busier encounters, and some of the English localization is rough around the edges, though that roughness has a charm of its own. The story is straightforward and does not try to be more than a coming-of-age school brawler needs to be. This is not a game that reinvents the genre or surprises you with late-act narrative twists. What it is, though, is a genuine piece of work from a small team who clearly loved the games they grew up playing and wanted to make something rooted in their own world. For players who value that kind of handcrafted sincerity, who enjoy brawlers as a comfort genre, or who are simply curious about seeing an underrepresented cultural setting rendered with this much affection, Troublemaker delivers something real. Give it the few hours it asks for.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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