Acts of Blood är ett blodigt indie-bråkspel inspirerat av The Raid och skapat av en enda man

Some games take years of funding, a dozen pitch decks, and a 200-person dev team to get off the ground. Others start with one person, a YouTube tutorial, and a lot of stubbornness. Acts of Blood belongs to the second camp.

Built primarily by Fajrul FN—a solo Indonesian developer with backup from a few friends—Acts of Blood is a brutal beat-’em-up inspired by The Raid, Sifu, Sleeping Dogs, and gritty classics like Manhunt. It doesn’t hold back. It’s going all-in on violence, close-quarters combat, and cinematic takedowns. There’s even an X-ray kill system in the works.

The game made its first splash at Summer Game Fest 2025, when Geoff Keighley himself reached out to Fajrul after spotting the project online. Now it’s picking up serious attention, and for good reason. It looks and feels like something that crawled out of a VHS action movie and landed in Unreal Engine—bloody, fast, and made with a lot of care.

“Pretty graphic. We’re going all-in on violence as a core part of the experience,” Fajrul said in an interview.

“Brutal takedowns, dismemberment, and yes, our own version of X-ray kills.”

That tone carries through every detail. Set in Bandung, Indonesia—a city not often represented in video games—Acts of Blood draws heavily from the local atmosphere. The dev grew up there, and now he’s using it as the backbone for narrow corridors, slick rooftops, and moody night fights soaked in rain. The city’s mix of urban sprawl and natural elevation gives the levels a lot of movement, and it gives the camera plenty to work with during the action.

When you see Acts of Blood in motion, the influences are immediately obvious. There’s the grounded tension of The Night Comes for Us. The choreography is snappy and painful. It channels Sleeping Dogs’ counter-heavy system but leans more on combo layers like Sifu. Everything is tuned to feel fast, harsh, and reactive. Fajrul’s focus is on making players feel every hit and rewarding them when they chain attacks together with precision.

Early combat footage shows dodges flowing into joint breaks, knees snapping jaws sideways, and improvised weapons like pipes and stools. Enemies don’t just ragdoll—they fold and drop hard. When you get a clean counter, you’re not just rewarded with control. You get a bone-crunching zoom-in through the skeleton, Mortal Kombat style.

And while it might sound like an over-the-top splatterfest, there’s more going on under the surface. This isn’t a big-budget showcase. It’s scrappy and handmade. Fajrul says the earliest versions of the game were cobbled together from a mess of Blueprints pulled from YouTube tutorials. He’s a 3D artist by trade, not a programmer, so the first builds were basically Frankenstein's built out of trial and error. That’s what makes the polish on the current footage stand out. It doesn’t look like a janky prototype. It already looks like a playable cult hit.

Right now, the team behind Acts of Blood is mostly Fajrul himself, plus a handful of part-time collaborators. He calls them Eksil Team—Indonesian for “exile”—and it fits. They’re working evenings, weekends, and odd hours around other jobs, slowly pushing the project toward launch. Music, animation, and voice work are coming in from friends. Everything else is still in Fajrul’s hands, from level design to combat logic.

The setting isn’t a 1:1 map of Bandung, but it captures the city’s feeling, especially the cooler air, tight alleyways, and mid-rise architecture. You won’t find flashy skyscrapers or wide-open arenas here. This is personal, lived-in, a mix of homage and tension. There’s personality in the design that you don’t often get in glossy combat-focused games.

If it all goes to plan, Acts of Blood will launch on PC first, with console ports planned via the ID@Xbox program. The game is already being scoped to fit on Xbox, and if the momentum continues, a PlayStation version isn’t out of the question. The focus now is on making the core combat feel perfect.

For Fajrul, this is more than a project. It’s a kind of return. He’s worked in the professional game industry for five years, but Acts of Blood started as a way to recapture the fun of doing it solo—getting back to that early Blender Game Engine energy where there were no rules, just creation. That energy is all over the game’s DNA.

What stands out the most, even in its early footage, is that Acts of Blood has direction. It’s not just checking boxes or chasing trends. It knows exactly what it wants to be: a vicious, stylish brawler where every punch matters. It’s not trying to compete with AAA polish or mass-market reach. It’s carving its own space with blood-soaked gloves.

While we’re seeing a wave of Southeast Asian devs make their mark lately—like the Jakarta-based team behind DreadHaunt or the horror-roguelike Yurei Station—Acts of Blood is staking a different claim. It’s not horror. It’s not stealth. It’s a fight game, and it’s not pulling any punches.

If all goes well, it’ll drop sometime in 2026. Until then, it’s one of the most promising indie action games in development—and one of the bloodiest.