East Asian game developers have long been prominent in the industry β take Japanese exports such as Nintendo's PokΓ©mon. In recent years, Chinese games like Genshin Impact and Black Myth: Wukong have had worldwide success. And more recently, Korea has hit its stride with games such as Crimson Desert, Lies of P and Stellar Blade. Over the past decade, indie games from South Asian studios have obtained more modest success overseas, including the roguelite Asura from India-based Ogre Head Studio and the action adventure Raji: An Ancient Epic from Nodding Head Games, also based in India.
But South Asian representation in gaming is growing, in part through stars and developers from the diaspora.
PlayStation's newest roguelike shooter Saros, out this week and starring the British actor Rahul Kohli, is poised to be a hit. Alongside indie games including the 2023 narrative cooking adventure Venba and the 2026 turn-based, role playing game Dosa Divas, these recent titles demonstrate the breadth of different approaches that video games can take.
Storytelling about the immigrant experience
Venba, developed by Toronto-based Visai Games, is about a couple who moves from India to Canada for a new life. The eponymous character, Venba, and her husband eventually have a son named Kavin. She cooks Indian food with Kavin, but pages from her recipe book have been ripped up and instructions have been smudged out thanks to the passage of time. Players have to accurately recreate the recipes, relying on other things like diagrams; this functions as the Venba's puzzle gameplay. As Kavin grows up, he starts assimilating more to Canadian culture, but as an adult, attempts to reconnect with his South Asian heritage. At one point, he notes that some of his mom's recipes are written entirely in Tamil, his mother tongue β but since he can't read it, he has to rely on the pictures she drew to cook the dishes. It's an experience that many immigrant kids can relate to.
The game is primarily told from Venba's perspective, bucking a trend; games including Life is Strange 2 and Butterfly Soup 2 are told from the viewpoint of second generation children like Kavin.
Venba director Abhijeeth (Abhi) Swaminathan says players often think his own personal experience is similar to Kavin's, but he and Kavin are two very different people. He says he had a very different relationship with his own parents.
"When growing up in Canada, what I saw was that a lot of the struggles that [immigrant] kids face growing up [were] echoed in the media," he explains. "It makes sense, because the media is made by those kids, right?" But he observed that sometimes immigrant parents were caricaturized. "Sometimes their accents are played up."
"A lot of the media β¦ focuses on immigrant pain or parents really pushing for their culture, and they want you to speak the language," he explained.
"I wanted to hone in on that. Why, though? Why is it important to them? What have they given up? What have they sacrificed?" Swaminathan asked. "I thought that was left untold, and that's what always bothered me when I watched this media. That's where I think the effort to capture that came from."
In his game, Venba speaks Tamil and Kavin speaks English.
"Food is a love language, right? But in this case, it's pretty much the only language they have," says Swaminathan. At one point in the game, Kavin doesn't show up for dinner, and you can tell that his mother is visibly crushed. "So I think there's a lot of potential in storytelling, especially within an immigrant culture."
Blending a story of food and commodification
Outerloop Games is a minority-led studio located in Seattle that has released multiple games featuring South Asian themes and characters. The virtual reality adventure Falcon Age touches on themes of anti-colonialism as it follows a young girl named Ara on a dying planet whose culture and resources were stripped away. She's thrown in jail and befriends a falcon in order to reclaim her home from invaders. The adventure game Thirsty Suitors takes a more urban approach, set in the fictional Timber Hills, and focuses on the dynamics of South Asian immigrant families, as protagonist Jala navigates her love life and reconnecting with her exes.
The studio's most recent game, Dosa Divas, is inspired by games like Super Mario RPG and Octopath Traveler. But it's also got a litany of other influences, including sci-fi and mechs, all married together. Like Venba, Dosa Divas also revolves around food. It follows two sisters, Amani and Samara, as they head back to their old family restaurant in the land of Meyndish, a fictional setting combining South Asian and futuristic aesthetics. However, their older sister, Lina, has transformed the family business into an evil corporation that sells meal slop in tubes. It's an enticing game tackling issues about how cultural aspects, including food, can be commodified.
Throughout Meyndish, players control Amani, Samara, and their sentient mech, Goddess, as they face off against Lina's army of lawyers, corporate managers, and guards. Goddess acts as a food truck, designed after the three-wheel auto rickshaw that's commonly found in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
"The mech has its own personality, charm, and history," explained game director Chandana Ekanayake. "So I was thinking about the scale of these sisters riding this mech, 'what are the spaces they navigate? How do we make that interesting?'"
Ekanayake's team landed on portraying the escalating impact of Lina's food empire through the game's three villages.
Players can also whip up food outside of battles and bring it into fights in order to heal or provide various effects. The concept fits into the game's themes.
"The battle system went through a bunch of changes to figure out the right balance, because we were initially fighting with food, and that didn't feel right," explains Ekanayake. "So we decided to use food for healing and recovery, also as a way to connect people within the towns together and keep that out of the battle system."
"So I think of food as a unifier," Ekanayake continues. "Our approach to games is: We're welcoming you into our home, giving you a good meal, hope you enjoy it, and then send you on your way. Food is a sort of metaphor for that and a lens to try something new."
A roguelike shooter focuses on the adventure
On the other side of the spectrum, PlayStation and Finnish developer Housemarque's latest game, Saros, has nothing to do with food. It's about a space enforcer named Arjun Devraj who travels to a hostile alien planet called Carcosa to find out what happened to his missing crew and locate a mysterious woman named Nitya. As Arjun journeys through the planet's hellish landscape, he fights through waves of monsters, repeatedly dying and resurrecting until he's successful.
Hollywood actor Rahul Kohli, known for his role as Sheriff Hassan in the 2021 Netflix series Midnight Mass, plays Arjun. As a lifelong gamer and PlayStation fan, Kohli was ecstatic that Housemarque approached him. Kohli preemptively said that he would take part in Saros, even before Housemarque showed him the pitch. In fact, the studio was already a fan of Kohli.
"Someone at Housemarque was already aware of one show in particular, which was Midnight Mass. So I was used in their concept art," Kohli explains.
Saros's monsters and environmental designs are rooted in Lovecraftian and eldritch inspiration. Coincidentally, Kohli's filmography and TV roles include lots of horror and supernatural projects, including Netflix shows such as The Haunting of Bly Manor and The Fall of the House of Usher. Horror isn't something that Kohli actively seeks out, though. His breakout role was Ravi Chakrabarti in the CW show iZombie starting in 2015, and since then, he says, these supernatural-adjacent projects have just been the way his career has developed. But he's a sci-fi kid at heart, so Saros was a dream come true for him.
Even with its heavy Lovecraftian inspirations, Saros isn't completely devoid of South Asian influence. The game's cover invokes imagery with a creature's eight arms, which symbolize divine power in Hindu deities.
Kohli agrees that Housemarque had a mythology in mind, but it's not alienating to anyone. "It's not like you have to be of a certain culture or be of a certain place in order to enjoy Saros. It's referential in a very light way," he says. "I'm appreciative that Housemarque had created something that anyone could play and anyone could be in, but it happened to be me."
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