Raji: An Ancient Epic

Raji: An Ancient Epic opens on a real Hindu festival rather than an invented holiday. Its orphaned protagonist, Raji, is a circus performer whose younger brother Golu is abducted by demons during Raksha Bandhan, the festival that celebrates the bond between brothers and sisters and centers on a sister tying a protective thread, a rakhi, around her brother's wrist. The abduction is the work of Mahabalasura, a demon lord seeking revenge against the Hindu gods, and Raji's quest to reach her brother becomes the game's excuse to move her, and the player, through a sequence of temples, palaces and battlefields built from Rajasthani architecture and Pahari painting.

The gods Raji meets along the way are drawn directly from Hindu scripture and epic rather than invented for the game. Durga, the warrior goddess and an embodiment of Shakti, arms Raji with the first weapon, the trishula, and remains the game's narrating voice throughout; Vishnu grants a divine bow, and Shiva and Brahma contribute further weapons and powers as the story advances. The game also works in the Sudarshan Chakra, Vishnu's discus weapon from the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and Naga serpent guardians drawn from the same body of myth, while Raji's own journey echoes the structure of the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, without retelling either one directly. The result stages a working introduction to a specific pantheon and its attributes inside a rescue story rather than a lecture, with Durga and the concept of Shakti carrying particular narrative weight from the opening scene onward.

The game began at a single real place. Founder Avichal Singh has said the idea came to him on New Year's Eve 2013 while visiting the Patwon ki Haveli, an early eighteenth century merchant mansion in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. He founded Nodding Heads Games in Pune in 2016 with Shruti Ghosh and Ian Maude, colleagues he had met while both were teaching art at a design college, and the studio spent roughly four years building the game around the forts, palaces and city textures of Rajasthan that had prompted the idea in the first place, rendered in a hand painted style modeled on the region's Pahari miniature paintings.

The mythology the team drew on was not limited to a single regional tradition. Alongside the Hindu deities who arm Raji through the main story, the developers have said the asura demon clans she fights were built with heavy influence from Balinese mythology, folding a second, related Southeast Asian tradition into the antagonist side of the game rather than the divine side. Raji: An Ancient Epic released as a timed Nintendo Switch exclusive on August 18, 2020, followed two months later by PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One versions; Netflix added a mobile release for subscribers in April 2023, and a PlayStation 5 version followed in April 2024, extending a small Indian studio's telling of its own country's mythology to a considerably wider audience than its original release reached.