A pregnant toll keeper works the night shift while the country outside her booth comes apart. That is the setup of 1998: The Toll Keeper Story, an Indonesian narrative game that has just landed on PlayStation 5, and for Malaysian players it is built on a crisis this region lived through firsthand.
The game comes from GameChanger Studio, the Indonesian indie developer behind the My Lovely series. It first found its audience on PC, where it holds a "Very Positive" rating on Steam, and the PS5 version brings that story to the console with features built around the DualSense controller.
Editor
Aiman Hakim chevron_right
Table of Contents
The story behind 1998: The Toll Keeper Story
You play as Dewi, a pregnant toll keeper who shares the night shift with a colleague, Sinta, while her husband Heru drives a taxi to keep the household going. The nation is fictional, but the backdrop is real: the 1998 Asian financial crisis, which triggered an economic collapse and days of rioting across the region, Malaysia included.
Director Riris Marpaung, one of the few female studio heads in Indonesia's games industry, based the story on finishing her own university thesis during that period, far from home. The hand-painted, sepia-toned art recreates the newspaper headlines and graffiti-covered streets of the era.
How it plays
The core loop will feel familiar to anyone who has played Papers, Please or Death and Taxes, both of which GameChanger names as inspirations. You check vehicles, verify identity documents, and cross-reference paperwork against a set of state rules that keeps shifting under you. Forgeries, inconsistencies, and people with nowhere else to turn interrupt the routine, and every shift comes down to the same question: follow the new directive to the letter, or bend the rules and carry the risk. A diary gives Dewi, and the player, room to sit with the weight of those choices.
What the PS5 version adds
The main addition is haptic feedback through the DualSense controller. The vibrations change with each type of vehicle passing through the booth, so they work as both a gameplay clue and a physical sense of the pressure building around Dewi through her pregnancy. There is also an Endless Mode with timed and "perfection" variants for leaderboard runs, along with a set of trophies to chase.
If you are still filling out your console library, our guide to the best PS5 games in Malaysia is a good starting point, and if the haptics are the draw, it is worth reading how Sony has made the DualSense controller central to the PS5 experience.
Price and availability
1998: The Toll Keeper Story is available now as a digital download on the PlayStation Store at USD 11.99, with the ringgit amount shown at checkout. Full details are on the official PlayStation Blog post for the game. The PC version remains on Steam for players who would rather sit at a desk.
Short, choice-driven games about ordinary people under pressure have found a real audience, and this one carries the added weight of a setting that Malaysians of a certain age remember only too well. At under fifteen US dollars, it is an easy one to try.
