RAJI: AN ANCIENTEPIC
What if GodofWar, but India?
YOU’RE THE SOLE WARRIOR CHOSEN BY THE GODS TO REPEL THE DEMON HORDES
I’m a right sucker for games that dip into real world history and mythology. I should just read some books, but a historical taster filtered through wild combat scenarios and action scenes doesn’t get old. Those lush, surreal God-of-War- esque backdrops are what the oral tradition was aiming for with all those myths anyway.
Raji is set in ancient India, thousands of years after a major war in which the demons rose to take down the gods that tossed them into the underworld. By this time, humans have become lazy and incompetent and greedy, having forgotten the important art of alchemy, now indifferent to the deities that governed their past. In short:
Humans did the human thing, and now the demons have returned in order to kill them all.
These aren’t storebrand gods and demons though. Raji weaves in ancient Indian myths, using iconic figures and settings to tell its story, though it doesn’t adhere to them too strictly. And as Raji, you’re the sole warrior chosen by these gods to repel the demon hordes. Just one warrior, gods? Really?
No worries. Raji’s down to clown—her brother was taken by the demons and seeing him to safety is more than enough for her to go to hell and back.
In my hands-on demo, the art hits me first and the camera work follows up with a right hook. Raji is a gorgeous game, every scene like a carefully composed painting. Misty mountains rise up in the background, the cloud layer perforated by palace spires. I walk into the mouth of a massive statue, gliding up the tongue of a wild-eyed beast whose insides lead to a temple adorned with fountains and waterfalls, intricate mosaics and statuary depict spiritual figures I’m likely to bump into or hear from on my journey.
DIVINE INSPIRATION
The gods actually narrate Raji’s adventure, watching and commenting from afar to check in on their chosen savior. It’s a nice touch, imbuing these unseen but much talked about forces with personality and motive. Their bird’s-eye perspective is mirrored by the elegant camera, which follows Raji from above, swooping in to tighten the frame around an intense fight or far out and above the entire scene to reinforce the scale of the world and the overbearing odds set against Raji. She looks like an ant down there.
The GodofWar comparisons are inevitable, and reductive I know, but where Raji differs from Kratos the most is in how she fights. She’s a young woman decked out with a dress and a staff. She’s incredibly fragile, not the Spartan wall of meat demons and gods alike have been hacking away at for over a decade. But she makes up for it in agility. Combat is defined by surveying the field, finding a gap in enemy animations, and swooping in for a quick combo. She can only take a couple of hits before death, so getting out of the fray is just as important. She can flip in and out over great distances, run up walls and leap away (or into an attack), and use bits of the environment like columns to climb away or swing around to change position and direction instantly. It takes a minute to adjust from my aggressive button mashing instincts, but when it clicks, the combat settles into a cozy rhythm.
Raji feels good and looks amazing, so the real test will be in how the puzzles, narrative, combat, and exploration articulate over the span of the game. It’d be a real shame if art and animation that is this excellent were wasted on a one-note adventure with no substance, but, I don’t know, if it stays this pretty throughout, I might be happy either way.