Becoming Pablo is a Drug Cartel Strategy Game From India

A five-person studio from Bengaluru is building a game about becoming the most powerful drug lord in the world. Tentworks Interactive, founded by Jayaditt Basani, revealed a fresh showcase trailer for Becoming Pablo through the Insider Gaming Showcase, offering the most detailed look yet at how its criminal empire gameplay actually works. 

The game draws obvious inspiration from Pablo Escobar and the broader drug trade era of the 1970s through 1990s, the same world that Narcos brought to mainstream audiences, but translates it into a strategy and management experience rather than a narrative one. As a player, the goal is to build a cartel from the ground up, expand your influence through alliances, blackmail, and bribes, and survive long enough to sit at the top.

Becoming Pablo Gameplay Revealed

Becoming Pablo is best understood as several different games layered into one, according to Basani’s conversation with Insider Gaming. At the strategic level, it functions as a grand strategy title, where players manage cartel influence across territories using alliances, corruption, and coercion as primary tools. Loyalty, the game notes, is the rarest resource. Beneath that sits a tycoon-management layer covering production facilities and distribution networks, the nuts and bolts of running a drug operation as a business. 

When territory disputes escalate, the game shifts into turn-based Risk-style battles for control of regions and resources. And when rivals or law enforcement come knocking, players switch into base defense mode to protect what they have built.

Real-world events from the drug trade's most wanted figures across three decades are woven into the experience, grounding the otherwise abstract strategy in the actual history of the era. It is a layered design for a small team to attempt, and whether it holds together will depend heavily on how well those distinct systems talk to each other rather than feeling bolted on.

Game Director Priyank Singh offered an update alongside the trailer reveal. "We can't thank our community enough for the support and excitement for Becoming Pablo. We are working hard toward our launch this year and truly value your feedback. We encourage everyone to join our Discord and participate in our playtests. Our team is always there, and we would love to hear from you about what else you would like to see in the game."

Tentworks Interactive is not a name most people in Indian gaming will recognize yet, but Becoming Pablo represents exactly the kind of original IP bet that the industry has been waiting for studios in this country to make. The team previously shipped City Block Builder, a smaller title that gave them the production experience to attempt something at this scale.

Five people building a multi-layered strategy game with this level of systemic ambition is not a small undertaking.  The fact that they have scaled it to a playable, showcasable state with active community playtesting suggests the project is further along than its low profile might indicate.