A New Indian Video Game Turns Kerala’s Ghost Lore Into A Haunting Meditation On Absence

Kerala. 1984. After weeks of silence from your wife, Indira, you arrive on a remote island in the backwaters to search for her. She has vanished without a trace. As you explore the abandoned house and the dark forests around it, you are pulled deeper into a spine-chilling mystery that refuses to stay buried in time.

This is the premise of ‘Thekku Island’, an atmospheric horror game set in 1980s Kerala, developed by Ales Devs Games. Based on folklore, ghost stories, and Kerala’s long-standing relationship with the supernatural, the game leans into a slow-burn structure of whispers and silences, building a sense of unease that lingers long after the end credits roll.

The game’s aesthetic draws deeply on Kerala’s well-established supernatural and folk-horror traditions across film and literature. Malayalam horror has never relied solely on jump scares; instead, it has often emerged from the porous boundary between the everyday and the otherworldly. From the spectral presences in ‘Bhargavi Nilayam’ (1964) and the psychological hauntings of ‘Manichitrathazhu’ (1993) to more recent phenomena like ‘Lokah’ (2025) and ‘Bramayugam’ (2024), ghosts are rarely just external threats in Malayali imagination; they are entangled with memory, desire, repression, and unresolved histories. Similarly, the region’s literary traditions — from folklore to pulp fiction — are populated by yakshis, restless spirits, and liminal beings that inhabit thresholds: abandoned homes, sacred groves, unexplored backwaters, and oppressed bodies.

The game aligns with a broader resurgence of horror across indie cultures globally. Across the world, low-budget indie horror films, experimental fiction, and narrative-driven games that focus on mood, atmosphere, and environment — or “vibe” — have re-emerged as one of the most responsive forms to a world increasingly defined by instability. As war, genocide, climate collapse, and the erosion of democratic structures shake societies worldwide, realism often feels insufficient to meet the moment. Horror, by contrast, offers a language for what cannot be easily articulated: dread without clear origin, danger without visible source, and grief without closure.

In Thekku Island, the missing wife is not only a plot device; she is the void, the absence of an emotional anchor, around which the entire experience orbits. The island, like the present moment, is saturated with this sense of absence: of certainty, of safety, of answers. And yet, in confronting this darkness, players find something paradoxical — a form of recognition that this uncertainty is what defines our times. Horror here is not only the fear of the unknown. It is a way of staying with the unease, of inhabiting it fully, and perhaps, in doing so, making it legible.

'Thekku Island 'is now available on Steam.

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