Photographs of the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur – which houses several intricately carved palaces, and bears the imprint of ancient cannonballs in its gates – rival anything in Guild Wars 2’s wildest concept art. The initial inspiration came from the architecture of Rajasthan, the state in northern India known for its extraordinary castles, built on colossal scale. “Especially in the Indian gaming industry.” “We all had this itching to do something that hadn’t been seen before,” Singh recalls. The project began in June 2015 with artists Shruti Ghosh, Ian Maude, and Singh.

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. 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. 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. 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. “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 always have Indian mythology in our heads,” game designer Avichal Singh tells us.

As a consequence, the genre’s stories were largely told from the perspective of triple-A studios in Canada and the US. 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. Think back to the days of Prince of Persia and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Prince of persia 3d development artwork