India is not really known for video games, which is strange considering how many game studios have branches here. India has companies like Ubisoft, Rockstar Games and Sumo Digital lying around. The main problem is that these branches are usually supporting branches and very rarely get to work on even remasters by themselves. Sure there are a ton of companies that make small gambling or very dull mobile games like Zapak, but most gamers don’t really care about them. This keeps India virtually unknown in the game development community.

India, a country virtually unknown when it comes to game development finally has a game to be proud of, or does it?

Story:

A long time ago a demon carried out penance, believing that this demon would turn over a new leaf Brahma sought fit to give him immortality and a weapon. This demon saw this as a chance to unite the demons who followed him to wage a war. When urged to stop, he killed a God without thought. To counter the demons Lord Shiva’s separated the continents to stop the demons once and for all. 

In the modern-day Raji and Golu are carnival workers. Raji an acrobat and Golu a storyteller are carnival folk, they have no home and their only family being the people that they work with, they only know the life of the carnival worker for they have no family  While Golu tells the tale of the Gods and demons the ultimate coincidence occurs: The demons find this a perfect time for a comeback and attack, they kidnap Golu while Raji escapes the onslaught so that she might find her brother. Raji at its core is a story about siblings, Raji and Golu are tragically separated by attacking demons and find themselves in the middle of a chaotic war. 

And if you’re thinking that this sounds intriguing, it very much is! But where the game falls short is in its method of storytelling. It is initially very vague at telling you what you have to do. The game actively and very suddenly places you in a position of urgency with not enough buildup, this leads to the overall moment feeling extremely lacklustre. The story is delivered via cinematics and audio delivered in-game. The cinematics are cool to look at, they are 2D marionette shows using limited colours that are really cool as they display the Indian culture with as little as possible. I love this choice of design for the simple reason that it makes me feel like something that I would see at an Indian carnival. It is somehow vibrant but without colours, it shows action with limited movement, it is the perfect example of modern display design while not trying too hard.

The in-game delivery on the other hand is flat-out annoying. The delivery is done by the Gods Durga and Vishnu who don’t know when to shut the fuck up. They talk, they talk and they keep on talking. They comment on everything, they want to talk about all the portraits, the designs on the floors and about how Raji moves… I swear, if Zeus was their ruler he would have cast lightning onto them just so that they would shut the fuck up. Their discussions are so overpowering that it actually forced me to mute the sound just so that I could listen to something… anything else.

Although I admire the gorgeous presentation of the game, the story as a whole is alright but suffers from below-average storytelling and a really unfulfilling ending.

Graphics:

I do not have any major gripes about the graphics, the world looks and feels great. For an Indie studio it is rather impressive how great the game looks. It certainly falls in that niche category of Indie games which look and feel gorgeous. You get to traverse across beautifully crafted medieval Indian structures, these often make you feel like they were handcrafted for each section.

There are some interesting choices to make the game look somehow minimalist and filled at the game time. The most obvious of these is the health bars which are in circles around the characters feet and only show up when needed. Another point to this is the special effects which are bright and colourful but disappear quickly, they are gorgeous when on-screen but are forgotten quickly so that you can get back to the task at hand.

The overall authenticity of the game being Indian is maintained in this regard.

Sound:

The background tracks in Raji are what you would hear in just about everything Indian and that annoys the hell out of me. There is no creativity at all in the background tracks, the developers have gone to royalty-free music sites and searched for “Indian Music”, got whatever was the cheapest and used that. This is one of the few times that I wished that the background music was just skipped as a whole since it is annoying, talentless and might as well be made by a child.

Speaking of children, I should give props to Nodding Head Games for enabling the people, just like the Indian government wants. The development team went out onto the streets in front of their office and hired people to do the voice acting. It is obvious that the voice actors aren’t anything remotely close to professionals, they are bad, to say the least. The narrator for the intro sounds bored out of her mind. The people playing Vishnu and Durga don’t sound like they are having a discussion, they sound like they are stuck in different rooms while sending voice mails to each other. Raji herself sounds like she was voiced by a eunuch, her pitch is annoyingly high while the rest of her lines sound like someone walking around a mall. Her voice carries no empathy, grief, excitement or any other emotion known to man. She should sound depressed and violent for revenge but her voice makes me feel no remorse for her in the least.

The combat effects are present but they are average at best. None of the enemy sound effects scare you while none of the attack effects feel powerful. These sound effects could have had more of a punch especially the lightning strikes that sound like a bad charger rather than death from above.

I usually don’t talk much about sound but no game so far has had sound so bad that I have noticed it. I never thought that there could be sound bad enough to kill a game but Raji has successfully proven me wrong. The sound is at a level of bad that it alone would force me to tell you not to play this game. If I hear “Golu” one more time this game is getting a 1/10 rating. 

Gameplay:

Moving on to the gameplay, Raji leaves a lot to be desired. You are introduced to the parkour mechanics as soon as you come out of the initial cutscene and the game starts off fairly well by taking things slow, allowing the player to get accustomed to the mechanics of the game. It uses the aura of mysticism established by the cutscene prior to enthral the player into continuing. Sadly, this feeling is quite often lost in the segments after. 

Five minutes into the game, as you finally reach your first instance of real combat. The game painfully reminds you of its mediocrity, the combat feels like it right out of Dante’s Inferno on the Xbox 360. It holds your hand and tells you that you need to mash x to kill the enemy in front of you. This was still not that big of a problem because most games nowadays like to hold your hand, but the problem arises when you realize that the combat essentially boils down to mash X to quick attack, mash Y to heavy attack and press A to dodge. The game goes on to introduce you to its wall-run attacks and special attacks, sadly even here the same attack is repeated in its two variants- the ‘quick attack’ and the ‘heavy attack’ and the game has this exact problem with the entire combat and the enemy types. These unique attacks can’t be used most of the time either because the game arbitrarily locks you to a combat area which is just out of the reach of walls and other fun things to use. It is so pointlessly stupid that I don’t understand what kind of person came up with this and thought it would be a good idea.

Speaking of the combat, there is significant delay between button press to the move being executed which never works when you are outnumbered. Adding to the confusion is the targeting system which switches targets whenever it likes you find yourself hitting the air more often than not.

Next up are the shrines, which essentially allow you to recharge your special attack and use it again. What’s baffling is that you need to physically be there and press x to activate it every time you wish to recharge your special. This too is a bad design choice as these specials should be recharged through combat or over time so that the flow keeps going.

For the first hour you only see recycled character models of the same enemy type and it gets dull really fast, while I do understand that this is an indie dev studio what perplexes me is that roughly two hours into the game, you finally get to see new types of enemies. The slow change in variety made me slightly bored, a couple of hours of the same combat loop of button mashing and using my special ability got stale really fast. 

I would actually say that the game did a great job with the puzzles. Every puzzle felt different and unique, some were fairly challenging. Just a fair warning to those who have played the Prince of Persia games: while a lot of the puzzles look similar the controls aren’t perfect replicas so reboot your muscle memory.

On to my biggest gripe about the game: The Camera. It is fixed and cannot be moved, so it always remains at an awkward angle which does not suit the game at all. It could have really benefited from a camera like the one in Trine 2 & 4. I’m not sure why they chose such an awkward angle. This is really noticeable during the acrobatic puzzles since you can’t judge the depth of the jumps that need to be made making for some embarrassing failures.

Moving on to exploration and how the narrative is put forward, it is painfully average. There is hardly any reason to explore because you end up getting stuck at invisible walls, and I did not find any easter eggs and such throughout the entire game. Not sure why the devs even included side areas to explore if there is no incentive to do so apart from a lame ability that you might learn.

To put it into perspective, I found a  divulging path and decided to take the left route which lead me directly to an Invisible wall, turns out I was not supposed to go there in the first place and I had to take the path to the right, the level design in this regard is lacking and unsatisfying. There is a lot of this poor level design going around. There are large areas that are there solely to show off how great a world the development team can make, while well and good they reduce the games pacing significantly since they have nothing to do besides walk through. If these areas were a quarter of their size they would have improved the game. 

Raji has some good mechanics and some bad. The good ones need to be tweaked for them to actually be good but the bad ones are so overpowering that they could ruin everything if not overhauled completely. 

Conclusion:

I think the game is extremely underwhelming and unnecessarily overhyped. The most annoying part about Raji is that there is a serviceable game below all the problems that may be another 6 months in development with someone who played games could have fixed. This is a game made by graphics designers with no understanding of gameplay loops. 

I appreciate the effort though and wish to see Nodding heads games learn from their mistakes before making more games. 

Buy on a deep sale, the game is average and currently not worth the asking price.

Pros	Cons
Cool Story Cinematics	Poor ingame story delivery
Great graphics	Poor special effects
NA	Poor Level Design
NA	Generic Music
NA	Really bad voice acting

Recommended Purchase Price: ₹200 or $4

 Score: 5/10