Raji: An Ancient Epic is an action adventure game from Nodding Heads Games. Raji tells the story of a character by the same name on a quest to rescue her brother and rid the human world of a demon invasion. This is an impressions piece based on the demo currently available on Steam. As such, things are subject to change.
There isn’t a whole lot to the demo, just enough to get a taste of what the full game will be like. It’s entirely focused on just the combat. You get a three hit combo, a magic blast attack that can hit groups of enemies, and a dodge roll. There’s an execution move you can use when enemies have low enough heath. Using this move seems to give you health or magic from the defeated enemy. Your weapon, a spear, can also be thrown for a ranged attack, which is used to hit enemies that are inaccessible.
Throughout the demo, you can obtain these gems that you can use to gain passive abilities. The demo only has two. One will occasionally cause lightning to strike an enemy you’re attacking. The other will cause a bolt of lightning to hit another enemy, effectively hitting two enemies at once. Again, I imagine there will be more in the full game. My favorite part about this system is that you can freely slot your gems into whichever ability you want, even after placing them. So if you don’t like one ability, you can just move them into some other ability.
Fighting enemies feels pretty fine, though I do have one gripe. In order to get the three hit combo to come out, you have to press the attack buttons fairly fast. If you wait until the attack has come out to hit the attack button for the next attack in the combo, you’ll just do the first attack again. Increasing the input window for attacks would be a great change. The only other issue I had is the combat felt really repetitive. Both due to a very limited moveset and just a lot of enemies. Just do your combo until you can execute an enemy, if there’s a group of enemies, use your big magic attack. I imagine this will be a demo only issue though. More varied enemy encounters and a more varied moveset would certainly be all you would need.
There are also two environmental puzzles in the demo. One is a fairly simple one where you have to throw your spear at a couple things in order to lower a bridge. The other involves rotating some colored rings to just match colors together. Not the most complex puzzles out there. The running theme of my thoughts on this demo is that I imagine there will just be more in the full game. For the color matching puzzle though, it’d be nice if the colors had some sharper contrast to them.
There’s not much else I can say about Raji. The demo was maybe a half hour. Visually, it looks pretty neat, and the music is nice. Every quibble I had is something that will probably be smoothed out in the full game, so I’d imagine it’ll be a pretty solid game, at least mechanically. One other suggestion would be the ability to re-bind controller inputs. Such features are always welcome.
Raji: An Ancient Epic is set to release in 2020.
