GameChanger Studio has revealed 1998: The Toll Keeper Story, a PlayStation 5 narrative game that places players at an Indonesian toll booth during one of Southeast Asia's most volatile political turning points.
Game director Riris Marpaung outlined the project on PlayStation's blog, describing a game anchored in Indonesia's 1998 monetary crisis, when cascading economic collapse and widespread unrest led to the fall of President Suharto's three-decade regime. Players take the role of Dewi, a pregnant toll booth operator who witnesses the upheaval one vehicle at a time, inspecting documents and currency while drivers on both sides of the political divide share their accounts with her.
The mechanic recalls Lucas Pope's 2013 indie landmark Papers, Please, which turned immigration document inspection at a fictional Eastern Bloc border post into a vehicle for moral decision-making under authoritarian pressure. 1998: The Toll Keeper Story applies the same rhythm to a civilian setting: the routine of the booth becomes the lens through which a national catastrophe is experienced at a human scale. The choices Dewi makes during these small, transactional encounters will shape the conclusion of her story.
PlayStation 5's DualSense controller carries a deliberate narrative role in the design. According to PlayStation, the Haptic Feedback response is tuned separately for each type of vehicle passing through Dewi's booth, a sensory layer that functions both as a gameplay cue and as a physical register of the compounding pressures Dewi endures while navigating her pregnancy through a period of national rupture.
GameChanger Studio renders the story through hand-drawn cutscenes produced in the studio's established visual style, a choice that preserves an aesthetic distance from the documentary realism that might blunt the material. Each in-game day closes with a diary entry, giving players structured space to process Dewi's anxieties as both a woman and a mother living through historical upheaval.
No release date has been set; the game is listed on the PlayStation Store for PlayStation 5.
