Making it in Unreal: action-adventure goes to India in Raji: An Ancient Epic

Think back to the days of Prince of Persia and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. A decade ago, action-adventure games were the preserve of triple-A studios with the engineering support and staff count to pull off cutting-edge 3D games. As a consequence, the genre’s stories were largely told from the perspective of triple-A studios in Canada and the US. “We always have Indian mythology in our heads,” game designer Avichal Singh tells us. “As gamers ourselves we never got to see much of it, and if we did it was stereotyped, cliched, cringey, or not executed well. We knew that isn’t how it is, and there was this thought of sharing the lore, myths, and stories of the subcontinent with the rest of the world. That’s where Raji happened.” Raji: An Ancient Epic is set in ancient India, where a young girl sets out to rescue her brother from demons - winning the favour of the gods as humanity’s champion in the process. It’s an action-adventure game stuffed with the traditional furniture of the genre - crumbling ruins overrun by climbing plants - but also splashes of primary colour and Hindu imagery. It’s a game enabled by the recent accessibility of engines like Unreal Engine 4, which are making a genre sometimes guilty of colonialism truly global.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2R46sZg