What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn't [Podcast]

I ask Mannat Jain of Kalp Studio why she and her co-founders set their first game in a town that isn't on any map, and get an argument back about what games lose when travel is only the gap between two objectives.

Kalp Studio is a three-person studio in India, and Jain runs narrative, business and marketing there. Their game Raahi casts you as Sandy, an auto rickshaw driver in Majili, a fictional coastal town assembled out of 1990s Goa: Portuguese facades, Hindu temples, a fish-shaped pond that exists nowhere. We work through what the rickshaw makes possible that a car does not, why Kalp Studio wanted a setting where a driver still knows the routes and the passengers, and how three people fake the scale of a whole town.

Jain talks about the food and the feni, the cassettes from Indian artists that play while you drive, and the pull of a decade much of the game's audience never lived through. I push on whether a specific place travels, and she answers with Tokyo: most of Persona is one city, and nobody treats that as a limitation.

Links

• The Long Way Around, Jamin Warren's feature on Raahi
• Kalp Studio

Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

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