The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) has officially unveiled its top 40 finalists for the 2026 SEA Game Awards. Running since 2017, the SEA Game Awards aims to recognise and celebrate the creativity, innovation, and technical excellence of the finest game developers from the Southeast Asian region.
This year’s SEA Game Awards will be held in conjunction with Level Up KL, organised by MDEC in Kuala Lumpur on 14-16 October 2026. The award winners will be announced during the SEA Game Awards Show on 15 October 2026, including an exclusive first look at a new, unreleased title from Metronomik.
Realm of Ink – Leap Studio
Realm of Ink is an “ink-style” action-roguelite game. While pursuing the Fox Demon, the swordswoman Red unexpectedly finds that her life is dictated by the ‘destiny’ within the world of the book. Only by breaking free can she unveil the truth of her existence and challenge the constraints of fate.
Homura Hime – Playism
Homura Hime is an anime-style 3D action game merging exhilarating thrills with the tension-filled gameplay of bullet hell. Players dodge hails of projectiles, unleash combos that blend close-quarters and ranged attacks, and utilize dodges and parries to withstand the fierce onslaught of demons.
Princess of the Water Lilies – Red Dunes Games
Princess of the Water Lilies is a hand-crafted 2D platformer blending gentle puzzles with heartfelt boss encounters. Play as Princess, a flat-faced cat raised by frogs. Your purr holds the power to heal a world caught between nature and machine.
Spook-a-Boo – Wala Interactive
Spook-A-Boo is a ghost hunting couch co-op game for 1-4 players. Play with friends and family to seek out and capture ghosts hiding in plain sight. Detect, scan, hook and trap all the troublemaking ghosts and have a spook-tacular time.
Abyssfall: Seekers Within – Kurechii
Abyssfall: Seekers Within fuses high-speed grid combat with instant tag-team tactics. In this action-roguelike RPG, positioning is only half the battle. When the floor turns red, why run when you can tag in? Swap to a Tank to absorb the hit, then snap to a Striker to crush the opening. Draft your trio, find broken synergies, and master the swap to survive the descent.
Deadly Rehearsal – Kaigan Games
Deadly Rehearsal is a first-person horror game where you must assist in running the rehearsal process for a cursed play. The game has you exploring an old theatre to help set up the next scene, then later on, run the rehearsals by executing light and sound cues. The curse projects ghostly apparitions from your past during the exploration parts while causing accidents after running each scene.
OPERATIVES: Revolve – Enigma Equation
OPERATIVES: Revolve is a roguelike deckbuilder with cards you can almost touch. Every card is both cover and weapon, discarded the moment it is used. In your hand, they block bullets, blades and death itself. Discover a unique deckbuilder built on deep, interacting mechanics.
Own Time Own Target – No Average Joe
Own Time Own Target drops two players into a divided battlefield in a pure 2D PvP shooter. The party game nobody asked for but everyone ends up playing. Easy to pick up, impossible to put down. Friendships not guaranteed.
Pigs and Wolf – Waka Studio
In Pigs and Wolf, players take on the roles of the iconic three little pigs who have been separated from their herd. To survive, they must use their imagination to craft, strengthen, and move their wagon home across an unpredictable fantasy world, in order to reunite with their herd in a piggy village.
TypeCaster – TBA Studio
A once-shameless thief, cursed with a slow, agonizing death, must now embark on a perilous journey to the top of the legendary Tower of Trials. TypeCaster challenges you to master lightning-fast reflexes and precise typing to battle hordes of fearsome monsters guarding each floor.
TCG Card Game Simulator – OPNeon Games
In TCG Card Game Simulator, you sell card booster packs to earn money and build the card shop of your dreams. Open your very own local game store and stock shelves with the latest booster packs, or crack them yourself and collect and build your own collection. Set your prices, hire staff, host events, and expand your small card shop in a huge and thriving business.
Voodoo Craft – InnerSight Games
In Voodoo Craft, you take on the role of a shaman whose actions appear to shape the fate of others. Run a cozy witchcraft shop in the strange village of Graveberg, mixing ingredients, crafting curse dolls, and performing hexes that twist fates and entangle villagers’ relationships. where every curse tells its story.
Duo Quest – 1+1 Studios
Duo Quest is a two player co-op deckbuilding game with a relationship-testing twist, that is set in a pixel art world. You and your co-op partner play as Pal-adins, two heroes who fight against The Demon King and his three generals, to bring peace back to their world.
Chess Nuke – Duwit
Chess Nuke is a high-synergy tactical roguelike where you don’t aim for a checkmate, you aim for total destruction. You aren’t here to play a fair match. You’re here to build a crazy engine of war, out-maneuver the enemy, and eventually annihilate the entire board.
BagMaster Isekai – Doors Studio
Welcome to the world of BagMaster Isekai, where you, the player, get to experience being transported to a whole new world. Here you’ll be helping the local piggies defeat waves of enemies in this delightful turn-based RPG. Collect and merge items in your bag to create awesome weapons, explore dungeons and castles, battle bosses, and test your strategy skills.
Rogue Skies – Mythtales Interactive
Conquer the skies in this tactical roguelike deckbuilder! In Rogue Skies, you’ll assemble your crew, load the cannons and defend your airship from raiding sky pirates as you blow them out of the sky!
AXERAS – Inverse Atelier
AXERAS is a turn-based tactical military JRPG that draws inspirations from the classics and aims to modernize the genre with a unique take on the nature of war and combat. Use different units and combine abilities to secure battlefield superiority, as every decision you make on the battlefield will eventually catch up to you.
Paper Islands – Napping Raccoon
Paper Islands is a single-player exploration and mapmaking game where you play an explorer more interested in riches and fame than making accurate maps. Sail on a living map that changes as you draw it, rough out the high seas, discover routes to rare silks and spices, and manipulate a coterie of frivolous rulers to further your own personal interests.
Puni the Florist – Earthquack Games
Manage a flower shop, design bouquets… with an odd-looking flower fairy?! Puni the Florist is a cozy simulation game where you run a magical flower shop with the help (and occasional chaos) of a clueless fairy. Run a flower shop, arrange unique bouquets, and build connections with the quirky townsfolk who wander through your doors.
Compensation Not Guaranteed – Team Project Lunch
Compensation Not Guaranteed is a story-rich document-checking thriller where you act as a government official of a post-colonial Southeast Asian nation. The nation is under rapid development, so it needs to acquire land. Your honorable task is to meet citizens who own the land and determine whether they really own it!
Sous Raccoon – Novice Flow
In Sous Raccoon, play as a raccoon sous chef managing restaurants while defending customers from monsters in this action-packed roguelike that blends cooking with combat!
Afterglow Bytes: Reverie by the Shore – Engram Interactive
Afterglow Bytes is a game about serving food with care and connecting with others, whether with loved ones, family, or the community. Play as an izakaya owner with patrons from various ways of life, ranging from high school students to C-level executives.
Soulcery: Deck of Shadows – YS246 Games
Soulcery is an action roguelike fused with deck-building combat. Steal enemy abilities to shape your battle deck and unleash relentless, zero-cooldown combos.
ALTEREDBLOOD+ – TrueWorld Studios
Spill the blood of your enemies, soak in their blood to awaken your weapons and abilities, and bring directionality to your ultraviolence in ALTEREDBLOOD+, a boomer shooter/ platformer. In a megastructure which has consumed the universe, human remnants survive, addicted to her blood. Embody her Reaper, and guide humanity to extinction.
Tikus Tales – WilKGames
Tikus Tales is a playful isometric 3D action platformer featuring two heroic mice, Suki and Tuki, who must outwit and defeat rebellious animals to restore balance to the Chinese Zodiac.
Feather Rogue – FireRabbit
Feather Rogue is a tactical card roguelike where each turn is a full combo, not one move. Spend your energy chaining cards across a grid, then trigger reactions that cascade across the whole board. You’re a crow. You’re a chemist. Set the trap, pull one thread, watch everything fall.
Machine of the Wasteland – Unite Game Enterprise
Machine of the Wasteland is a high-octane vehicular combat action game set in a brutal, post-apocalyptic world where survival hinges on your ability to outmaneuver and outgun your enemies. MOW offers a taste of the fast-paced, twin-stick shooter action, as you battle through open arenas with customizable combat vehicles.
Kooeh: A Timeless Delight – Twilight Foundry
Kooeh: A Timeless Delight is a cosy single-player narrative driven heartwarming restaurant management game about recollecting lost family recipes. Play as a 20-something white collar worker, who has been called back by your family to help clear up the family’s dessert restaurant as it is closing down. Little did you know, you are about to go on a wild journey.
Little Tree Kingdom – Bumi Studio
Little Tree Kingdom puts players in charge of a clan of gnomes building a new kingdom on, under, and inside a tree. Each turn, a hand of cards dictates what you can add to the colony: extend roots, grow branches, build houses, set up mines, or open shops. The goal is to keep the colony’s welfare balanced. Let any of the welfare drop too low, and you’ll lose your colony’s heart – literally.
Donjon Fauna – Bang Technologies
Donjon Fauna is an “asymmetric VR co-op fantasy creature veterinarian simulator” where a VR player cooperates with a non-VR player to heal wounded fantasy creatures. The VR player plays the role of a creature veterinarian intern, tasked with healing wounded creatures which are brought into the creature veterinary. However, the VR player does not have direct access to the manual with instructions required to heal the creatures, and will need to rely on help from a non-VR player with a manual.
PROJECT K1 – IFiO Studio
Project K1 is a hack-n-slash action adventure game inspired by the Megaman and Devil May Cry series. Follow the journey of the protagonist Rion Karmanz to become the first human Raja Rimba, King of All Majestic Beasts of Aisyalam.
Lirai: Heir of Darkness – Cryorbis Studio
Lirai: Heir of Darkness is an upcoming third-person action game set in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies and demons, where the obsession to dominate and control the world leads to fear, violence, destruction and, worst of all, extinction.
Holo ADV: SakuraSingularity.exe – Lexilia Games
Sakura Miko and the Hololive members are suddenly warped into an alternate future timeline in Holo ADV: SakuraSingularity.exe. In this 3D adventure game, Miko must reunite with her friends and uncover the truth of this strange world to find her way back home.
Merry Crisis – Monsoon Games
Merry Crisis is an intimate, contemplative romance visual novel about figuring out if home is what you left behind, or where you’re headed. After a break-up turns your world inside out, you return home for Christmas hoping for a change in scenery. As the days tick down toward the New Year, you need to decide: patch things up with your ex, rekindle an old flame, or pursue a fresh start with a charming stranger?
Kidbash: Super Legend – Authentic Remixes
Paying homage to the classic adventures of Mega Man and Kirby, Kidbash: Super Legend combines high-energy action, death-defying platforming, and exploration with deep roguelike progression and a charming claymation-style aesthetic that brings the game’s colorful characters and world to life.
Hang On, Sock! – Aman Azza
In Hang On, Sock!, you play as as a lonely sock, who must climb back to the rooftop and reunite with your pair. Swing and climb your way up, curl into Ball Form for extra height, and climb past the lower floors to survive the mid-floors. Somewhere above it all, against a rooftop sunset, your other half is still hanging on.
End of the Rail – University of Wollongong
Board your train as you go on your quest to seal the eldritch portal! In End of the Rail, plan routes to rest site and ride along as battles play out automatically, all while micromanaging your train, upgrading your equipment and reconfiguring your loadout to survive as the difficulty ramps up!
Fish Can Man – Asia Pacific University
Fish Can Man is a student game project developed by students from Asia Pacific University’s Game Development course.
Mission Mancala – Hoop Studio
Mission Mancala is a dark roguelike deckbuilder where you play as a detective investigating disturbing events tied to an ancient Mancala board. Build your deck, manipulate marble flow, and survive shifting rules as hidden clues reveal the game is connected to something far more sinister.
??? – Metronomik
An upcoming unreleased title from Metronomik, which will be exclusively revealed during the SEA Game Awards.
For more information, follow Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation on their socials.
