But the game, a labour of love that was often a struggle to get made by its small team, has a rather specific design intent. Beyond asking players to tackle its demon-like monsters with acrobatic fight moves, the game seeks to highlight a place – ancient India – and the culture it birthed.

“From the very beginning we wanted to do a game that represents Hindu culture. We didn’t see any game that was made from India that had that,” says Shruti Ghosh, co-founder of Nodding Heads Games, whose founders had jobs at the Indian outposts of major game studios before going independent in 2017.

“We had not seen a game made with this mythology. So we just went for it.”

While the game uses religious iconography and seeks to recreate Indian temples and their patiently painted murals of Hindu legends, Raji itself is an original good-versus-evil story.

The gods and demons are shown in art throughout, and the game is narrated by the deities Durga and Vishnu. The small development team uses the stories more to illustrate a lineage, to create the sensation that the player-led character is creating a new myth. Great pains, however, were taken to show reverence.

“Smudging the image of any god was a big no,” says studio co-founder Avichal Singh. “Even small things [can cause offence], like in Hindu culture your feet cannot point toward a god.”

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Completing the making of the game, which is currently available for the Nintendo Switch and coming to the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in October, became something of a cultural mission for the team.

For Ghosh, the more she studied the art of medieval India, the more she saw the game as a way to showcase traditions that are being lost – a point that was underlined when she and the studio’s third co-founder, Ian Maude, were in Bali and learned about passed-down mask-making traditions.

“In India, all these art forms are slowly dying,” Ghosh says. “Nobody wants to learn this any more. Where are they going to be used? This is the reason I wanted to pay tribute to that style. It’s so beautiful, it’s so intriguing, and the amount of hard work, the exact patience you need to do this kind of art, is mind-blowing.

“But it’s going to be lost with time. So for people to see that there is something like this, and it can result in another art form, is something I wanted to bring to the game.”

Ghosh also orchestrated the game’s interstitial scenes, which take their look from Balinese shadow puppetry. Here, the orange-yellow backdrops contrast the fragility of the paper-like cut-outs with a sinister tone.

For those paying extra close attention, Singh says the fighting combos that players can piece together specifically recall martial arts moves that originated in India.

Things could all have turned out quite different after a 2017 campaign on crowdfunding site Kickstarter failed, sending the team into a panic.

“We used all our savings,” Maude says. While the team eventually linked with investor Super.com and also received in 2018 an Unreal Dev Grant from Epic Games, they were at one point asking their families for grocery money.

“We were desperate for money,” Maude says. “Shruti sold her apartment. But our families could see how important this project was to us. We were literally using all our funds to keep a roof over our heads. Us three weren’t taking a salary.”