One of the more wholesome trends in Indie gaming of late has been handing over the figurative Lakitu camera to those who don't often get to tell their stories in their own words, at least not in the video game medium. I've taken to calling these games "anthropology games" or "folklorist games" in the past: those that come from countries that don't have much of an extant game industry, and have chosen to introduce themselves to a global audience of players by simultaneously introducing their local culture and mythology. There's been several of these over the years, many of which I've previously covered: Never Alone, The Mooseman, Severed, Oknytt, or Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan to name but a few. Raji: An Ancient Epic is a very ambitious, if not particularly complex, action-adventure game in the mold of something like God of War or the top-down Lara Croftgames in which a young woman, the eponymous Raji, is granted strength and a powerful spear by her patron deity Maa Durga to fight the demons that kidnapped her kid brother Golu. Along the way, both she and the player are given a guided tour of Hinduism's major mythological figures of note, either described through murals or met face-to-face as one of the game's handful of perilous bosses.

Raji is, if nothing else, a bold attempt by new studio Nodding Heads Games to put India on the Indie gaming map (they're only a letter off, after all). Not only does Raji look stunning, but it manages to focus half its time on a relatively robust combat system that takes a simple base of two attack types - light and heavy - and a smattering of weapons, and then integrates fanciful techniques like climbing and leaping off walls and pillars to deliver powerful aerial attacks. Most weapons have an alternative firing mode that lets you target distant or flying enemies - though once you get the bow, it's usually simpler to just switch to that if you've got flappy monsters to deal with - and a choice of three elemental enhancements that individually can be upgraded for additional benefits. Since the game isn't long enough to give you sufficient upgrade orbs to max out every element, you're free to unequip and shuffle those upgrade orbs around to where you need them most. The other half of the player's time is spent on its acrobatic platforming and occasional puzzle-solving, which has you running up and across walls and sliding down flags and pillars. This half isn't quite as elaborate as the combat and the imprecise nature of the platforming can occasionally be a downer, though the game checkpoints frequently enough that it's rarely a nuisance for long. The few puzzles Raji has are all based on that mini-game where you spin around concentric discs to complete a picture: these don't seem to serve much of a purpose besides breaking up the combat and platforming of the rest of the game, and they've yet to do that thing I've seen in some HOPAs where they're made more complicated by having multiple rings move at once.

The real champion of Raji: An Ancient Epic, as evinced by these screenshots, is the combination of an attractive graphics engine for its core gameplay combined with a striking shadow puppet show aesthetic for its cutscenes, which relay what happens to Raji between chapters as her pursuit takes her all across ancient India. Visually, the game makes great use of occasional vistas - a bit like Starbreeze's Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and its benches - and makes Raji feel like a very small figure in these impressively-sized fortresses and palaces by zooming the camera quite some distance out. The more miniature heroine can often work against the game too, especially in combat when she's getting surrounded and it's tricky to tell which direction attacks are coming from, but outside of battles it is an effective way of showing off the surrounding environs while also punctuating Raji's uncommon courage in the face of such enormous dangers: this is even more overt with the boss fights, which often pits Raji against colossal foes that dwarf her many times over.

Raji is, as you might expect from the production values for what is ostensibly an Indie studio product, a little on the short side. It has four or five large levels each with its own distinct level design aesthetic - I really like the second of these, as an elaborate palace full of tranquil ponds that you visit at night-time - that follow a shorter opening level that provides all the tutorials you might need, after all of which it checks out around the four to five hour mark. (At least, that's what I've picked up from poking around the achievement list: I'd estimate I'm about three-quarters done.) However, this doesn't really serve as a detriment because the game mechanics are just elaborate enough to maintain this runtime but might struggle to retain the player's interest in a game 50% or 100% longer. It calls to mind Ninja Theory's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, in that both games smartly understood that they don't have the resources or mechanical depth to extend these cinematic adventures beyond a handful of hours and turned that brevity into a strength to tell a compact and emotional story of a warrior heroine in a strange land pushed beyond her limits.

From researching the game it sounds like the Indian government wants to make mid-tier Indie games like Raji: An Ancient Epic more of a priority going forward, helping to fund these studios and train their developers. India's no stranger to video gaming as a whole, of course - as a country with more than a billion people it makes up a considerable audience percentage of online phone games such as PUBG Mobile and the many gachas out there - but so rarely do we get to see games filled with Middle-Eastern mythology and architecture that isn't the easily-destroyed set dressing for a globe-trotting westerner-led game like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, but rather one where said mythology and architecture themselves are the intended draw.

Raji: An Ancient Epic has more than its share of little issues - the aforementioned apportioning of the upgrade materials, for instance, means one of the achievements where you're meant to fill every upgrade slot is impossible without exploiting an upgrade orb cloning glitch, or voiceover actors who give away their non-native speaker status with the occasional odd inflection (the clockwork city of Rangda, for instance, has a lot of "meh-kan-iz-ums" rather than "meh-ka-ni-zums") - and it took a while to warm up to its combat with how challenging it can be to follow the action with everything as zoomed out as it is, but on the whole the game is solidly built, maintains a reasonable difficulty curve, draws from a plethora of sources from God of War to Okami to the Ubisoft Prince of Persia games, and wisely sticks around only as long as it needs to tell Raji's story.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: That's... uh, certainly one way to conclude a game. Clearly the developers have designs on a sequel, perhaps one that could benefit from this game's financial success as a staging ground for something much longer and more elaborate, but I can't imagine there aren't hundreds of other Hindu myths they could draw from without dropping an ambiguous cliffhanger ending that delights nobody. Some minor corrections here too: The trophy for maxing your upgrades isn't bugged any more - it unlocks once you find all the ones the game has to offer - and there's only three large stages, as the final two are much shorter and more narrative-focused. The boss fight difficulty is all over the place too: the third level's boss requires you switch your weapons around to tank some undodgeable blows and the game hadn't bothered to tell me how to do that yet. However, the issues covered above tend to be the result of a studio still finding its feet; there's some confidence on display here and a willingness to take chances, even if it occasionally feels like the game structure fell out of the mid-2000s, so I'm sure the studio's next game will be far superior.