Editor’s note: Nodding Heads Games gave IGN India access to a build of its upcoming game Raji: Kalyuga at its Pune HQ. This build is currently available to everyone at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, Germany.
Nodding Heads Games built Raji: An Ancient Epic with a small team and turned it into one of the more internationally recognised Indian games of the last decade. That game was an isometric adventure, modest in scale but confident in its mythology. Raji: Kalyuga, revealed with an epic, attention-grabbing cinematic trailer at Xbox Partner Presents in November 2025, throws that modesty out the window. I spent 45 minutes with a hands-on build ahead of Gamescom 2026, and the ambition has come a long way. A team of thirteen people is in the process of making something that looks and moves like it belongs next to games with budgets and headcounts several times its size.
Raji: Kalyuga – A Much Bigger World
The jump in perspective from isometric to 3D changes everything about how Raji: Kalyuga presents its world. Where the first game kept Vitala Lok at a distance, this sequel puts the camera behind the characters and lets the Loka’s density do the talking. Rock formations, foliage, wildlife and architecture are rendered with a level of detail that holds up under scrutiny even when the camera pushes close on Raji’s earrings or her beautiful, intricate traditional dress. The environment I explored had a specific mood to it, a sense that something had gone wrong, and the developers confirmed that each of the game’s other realms will carry their distinct visual identity. Combat effects reinforced that same sense of polish. Power surges, elemental auras and hit reactions all felt like they have proper weight and impact, snapping fast where the moment calls for speed and slowing down where needed.
The area I played through acts as an introduction to the game’s world, traversal and combat. There are small groups of enemies, platforming sections, a mini-boss and eventually a larger boss encounter, giving you a condensed look at some of the systems that Nodding Heads is building in the sequel.
Two Rhythms
Raji fights the way you would expect if you have played the original. She wields the Trishula spear, employs fast acrobatic combos, and a satisfying roll dodge effect among several dodge options that I tried and mostly ignored in favour of the roll. Her big new toy is a dash-to-boss mechanic that solves a problem I didn’t realise bothered me until now. Normally in a boss fight, you are sprinting across an arena just to get back into range; here, one button press and Raji closes the distance herself, with acrobatics doing the work that you would otherwise waste time doing with her legs. The developers tied this directly to her backstory (she grew up doing this kind of scrambling on the street circus), and mechanically it is borrowed straight from the Arkham/Spider-Man school of free-flow combat, where closing distance is part of the rhythm.
The sequel’s second protagonist, Darsh, is the one I keep thinking about, mostly because I am still not sure I fully understand him yet. I mean this as a compliment, as there is much more to see from him. He fights at range, throwing orbs tied to a system called Siddhis (which literally means “magical powers or abilities”). This also brings a very different approach to combat: while his primary attacks involve orbs, his real uniqueness comes from the Siddhi system, which grants him several types of powers. The demo included time, energy and gravity as categories, although only energy and gravity were available during my session. Developers also confirmed that more categories are planned, with some apparently being passive.
Gravity lets Darsh lift and fling enemies. Energy gives him a shield and some other abilities which you can trigger with combos. You can combine different Siddhis too. Light attacks mark enemies with a Siddhi type; you can stack two marks of one kind and a third of another, and that combination unlocks a different, more powerful move entirely. Is this going to be the kind of system that rewards mastery once the full roster of Siddhis is unlocked, or is it going to buckle under its own complexity the way overstuffed combo systems sometimes do? I don’t know yet, and I don’t think 45 minutes with two of an eventual larger set of powers is enough time to figure out in a game that is a work in progress.
What I do know is that Darsh’s dodge animation gave me trouble, repeatedly, in a way Raji’s didn’t. The developers insist that both characters have identical dodge timing under the hood. I believe them. I also don’t care, because belief doesn’t fix the fact that my hands kept mistiming his combos. With Raji, dodge-into-attack felt like an instinct; with Darsh, you have to consciously wait out his slower, spinning animation before the game registers the input, and in a demo that throws every mechanic at you back to back with no room to breathe, that gap was the one place where the whole thing didn’t feel natural. The developers are apparently getting a healthy dose of this exact feedback live at Gamescom right now, so consider this one already flagged from multiple directions.
The HUD That Isn’t There
Here is a design decision that I have some real affection for: there is no HUD in Raji: Kalyuga. None. Raji’s health shows up as petals arranged around her body, a callback to the first game. In addition, every other bit of important information, like the charge level of your power and the state of an enemy, gets folded directly into the characters and the environment instead of floating in a corner of the screen. Scaled across two characters and a much denser world than what the original attempted, that is an ambitious commitment, and when it works, it works beautifully.
However, the traversal does get complicated in all of this. The world is packed, decorated within an inch of its life with fauna, creatures, environmental detail everywhere you look, and figuring out which rocks you can actually climb versus which ones just look climbable became a recurring source of confusion. Two visually identical ledges, one you can scale and one you can’t, with no obvious tell between them. The studio’s answer is a deliberate refusal to use traditional yellow paint, replacing it with subtler golden dust particles that mark the intended path. It is a philosophy I respect on principle (nothing kills immersion faster than a neon-yellow “climb here” sticker slapped over otherwise gorgeous art direction – though Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi would disagree), and the developers were candid that this is something they are still actively working through – how do you tell players “go here, not there” without breaking the immersion you have spent so much effort building? Like the developers, I don’t have the answer to this question.
Devotees and Demons
The enemies in this demo are Bhairav Ganas, specifically a subset called Krodhs, semi-divine warrior spirits in service to Bhairava, a powerful manifestation of Shiva. During my time with the game, I faced basic grunts followed by a more agile variant, then a miniboss, and finally, a king-tier enemy waiting at the end. This raises an obvious question, one I suspect anyone unfamiliar with the mythology will ask as I did: “Why are we fighting the devoted servants of a god?”
The answer the developers gave me is a pretty interesting lesson in mythology. Diving deep into it, Vitala Loka sits entirely outside the ordinary cycle of life and death, sustained by a golden river called Hataka, flowing from Shiva and Parvati’s eternal dance, and the Krodhs’ devotion has warped into an obsessive hunger for combat that is not really their fault as much it is their nature. Killing them, per the developers, isn’t killing at all. Instead, it is liberation, freeing spirits trapped in a cycle of compulsive violence. An interesting foundation for what is, mechanically, a straightforward action-adventure combat loop, and I am curious whether the writing team can carry that philosophical weight through the entire game without it either disappearing under the gameplay or tipping into a lecture territory.
Set six years after the first game, Raji: Kalyuga is designed to stand on its own even for players who have never played the original, with a broader scope that fills in context as it goes. Hindi voice work, added to the first game post-launch and reportedly a big hit with players, is confirmed for this one too, though the demo I played had entirely placeholder audio, so I could not experience it during my session.
Where it Stands, Technically
The build I played ran on an Intel Core i7-13700KF, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 with 12GB GDDR7 VRAM, and 32GB RAM, and never once stumbled during my session. Though I will note the obvious caveat that a curated demo on strong hardware tells you very little about how the finished game would run on a mid-range rig years from now. Developers noted that they have planned to add Nvidia DLSS and Frame Generation graphics technologies, with AMD FSR under consideration. More importantly, the team is targeting 8GB of VRAM as a baseline, citing GPU memory as the real bottleneck for Unreal Engine titles at the lower end.
There is no release window for the game at the time of writing. The developers highlighted that this run of showings, at their studio in Pune and at Gamescom 2026, is a feedback-gathering exercise before they go back and refine what is here. For now, if you want to try it yourself, you will have to catch it in person at an event.
More importantly, Raji: Kaliyuga already gives the impression that Nodding Heads has learned a lot from the first game. It has taken the foundation of Raji and expanded almost every major part of it: the camera, environments, combat, traversal, characters and the mythology.
Another significant point is that Raji: Kaliyuga is a substantial leap in ambition. The game I played is much larger in scope than the original, and seeing this kind of production quality from a 13-person Indian studio is probably the most surprising thing about the entire demo. There is still plenty of work to do before release, but Nodding Heads has clearly set its sights much higher this time. And judging by what I played, it has a reasonable shot at getting there.
Rayan Sayyed is the deputy editor for IGN India who writes and speaks on pop culture, spanning from games, anime, manga to films and everything in between. You can reach out to him at [email protected], or find him on Instagram @rayansayyed and Twitter/X @rayanaver
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