People don’t say “I love to drive” as much as they used to.
Player Focus
In Project Madras (due for release this year), players wend their way through Chennai’s traffic signals, potholes and crowded Marina Beach. As they attempt to infiltrate the city’s organised-crime network to crack open a conspiracy, they must contend with incessant honking and construction noise too.
In Raahi (Kalp Studio; scheduled for release next year), players take the wheel of an autorickshaw and drive through a fictional Goan town called Majili. The objective is to earn enough points to win the month-long tuk-tuk race by ferrying passengers about, chatting with locals, and making feni and cooking Goan dishes for some extra cash. Hurdles to watch out for include expensive upgrades, and vehicle breakdowns.
“India has a very natural friction. It’s not easy to achieve the simplest of things because there are so many people and so much going on all the time,” says Shalin Shodhan, founder of Masala Games. “The natural friction makes for interesting gameplay.”
Unlike the bulk of Indian videogames set in India, which tend to be based in myth and an ancient past, these reflect contemporary pet peeves, local slang, city landmarks, foods and personality types. Players may thus encounter vehicles going the wrong way on a one-way street; vendors popping up overnight where there weren’t vendors before; milkmen, postmen and other fixtures that lend a city a lived-in feel.
The idea is to challenge the assumption that escape requires living a fantasy and leaving reality behind, says Sridhar Muppidi, chairperson of the Game Developers Association of India. “Such games let you role-play as somebody else in a familiar setting.”
Better tools, technology, and growing confidence among Indian developers are making it easier for developers to experiment and tell stories set in familiar environments.
“We wanted to offer something that’s slice-of-life,” says Akshat Sinha, design lead and co-founder of Kalp Studio. “How people actually live, and the connections they build.”
For Abeer Kapoor, founder of Civic Games Lab — whose releases include the card game Farzi, about misinformation; and the gamified platform Digital Naagrik, about digital rights — the shift is reflective of something larger: the decolonisation of gaming itself.
Team Analysis
In his game, Detective Dotson must learn the ways of riverside ghats, bargain with shopkeepers, chase people who litter and listen carefully at the chai stall. Each interaction earns him rewards or reveals clues to help with the investigation.
The gameplay is elevated by the fact that there are few repercussions for breaking the rules.
“You don’t have to respect a traffic signal. The freedom to add to the chaos without repercussions is part of the appeal. This transforms everyday frustration into a form of entertainment,” says Royston Ragul A, lead developer of Project Madras. “We really wanted our game world to behave like Chennai, where people are expressive on the roads, shout at traffic signals and honk a lot. We wanted to represent that.”
“If fantasy is about escape, whose fantasy are we escaping into,” Kapoor asks. “Why should our idea of an imagined world always have roots in Europe or America? The point is not simply to place an Indian character inside a borrowed format. The stories, conflicts, humour and mechanics should come from our cities, neighbourhoods, bazaars and addas.”
His ideal such game, he adds, would be one set in the world of Saeed Mirza’s classic Doordarshan series Nukkad (1986), about the daily negotiations, tensions and small acts of survival that hold a neighbourhood together.
Match Outlook
In a wry twist, game developers are now incorporating this chaos into videogame design, using it to add to the challenges of the plot. It’s cathartic, they say, and no rules apply. So go ahead and shout back at the irate commuter in the next car; honk that horn and let it all out.
In Detective Dotson (Masala Games; 2025), set largely in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, a hunt for a killer is derailed by wedding processions, gully cricket, movie shoots, a municipal office where no documents can be traced and, always, the chaotic traffic.
All of which sounds like a great step forward, but wouldn’t it be nice if the roads — in-game and real-world, literal and metaphorical — could be smoother too?
