The making of Unleash the Avatar: Rohan Mayya on mythology, memes and making a soulslike

MUMBAI: Picture a punishing, blood-soaked Soulslike set against the backdrop of Indian mythology, where a warrior named Vikram wields godlike abilities and signature weapons across breathtaking, sun-scorched locales, up against indigenous foes who refuse to go down easy. That’s Unleash the Avatar, the action RPG that’s kept gamers glued to comment sections for the better part of a year, thanks to a trailer packed with a brutal boss fight that sparked endless debate and a now-iconic hair-flip moment that quickly took on a life of its own.

Steering this mace-swinging spectacle is Rohan Mayya, co-founder of Aeos Games, a lifelong Soulslike devotee who’s played, in his own words, “every possible genre of game imaginable.” That passion is precisely why Unleash the Avatar exists at all, and why Mayya has no qualms talking frankly about piracy, artificial intelligence, mythology, and the internet’s favourite pastime: dissecting trailers frame by frame. And if you assumed Indian gaming was permanently parked in free-to-play mobile territory, Mayya is here to politely disagree, sword drawn, starting with the very mythology his game borrows from.

The story leans on Indian mythology loosely, borrowing characters and threads from the Puranas rather than retelling them wholesale, and Mayya is acutely aware of how easily this territory can turn treacherous. He points to the Chinese game Wuchang, which let players smash sacred idols on screen and promptly triggered a national backlash and a hasty patch. Aeos has built its caution straight into the design itself: no destructible idols, no disrespectful interactions, and most of the actual lore delivered gently through manuscripts, NPC chats and environmental storytelling rather than shock value.

That same reverence for culture, funnily enough, is also what gave the game its most viral, least reverent moment. Vikram’s now-infamous hair flip began, fittingly, as a mad impulse. “Let’s just add a hair flip move,” someone on the team suggested a year ago, half-joking. The team questioned it, put it in anyway, and watched it blow up online. Now it’s practically studio folklore, and more such flourishes are reportedly on the way. Mayya is entirely unbothered by accusations of “aura farming” that followed, gleefully pointing to rival Chinese title Phantom Blade‘s own spear-twirling execution move as proof that everyone’s doing it, just some more loudly than others. “You would see this in a Rajinikanth movie,” he says, before namechecking Devil May Cry‘s Dante and his motorcycle-as-weapon as further evidence that theatrical flair and serious combat have always coexisted happily. Yes, there will even be dancing, Hindi cinema style, somehow woven into a Soulslike without breaking tone. Mayya won’t reveal how, only teasing that “there may be some amount of mind control” involved.

A hero this theatrical needed a voice to match, and that’s where Hollywood voice actor Johnny Yong Bosch, known to anime fans everywhere, enters the picture. His casting came together almost by accident. “Varun just came impulsively to me and said, let’s just get someone like Johnny Bosch on,” Mayya recalls. Bosch himself wasn’t initially convinced an Indian character would suit his range, but a trial recording changed everyone’s mind instantly, and now his ferocity is baked into Vikram’s every line.

With fellow Indian title Age of Bharat also generating its own share of buzz, one might expect some elbow-throwing between studios chasing the same crown. Instead, Mayya sounds almost paternal about it. “It is very, very, very, very good that we have more games coming,” he says, arguing that India’s gaming industry needs several successes, not just one, to properly take off, much as Black Myth: Wukong‘s success opened doors for a wave of Chinese titles that followed. His own ambitions, though, are anything but modest. “Our competition really is someone like Wukong,” he says plainly, rejecting any notion of merely being the best game to come out of India. The goal, as he told his team after a recent all-hands meeting, is a shot at being world class, full stop.

That global appetite explains why, despite India’s gaming market being overwhelmingly mobile and free-to-play, Unleash the Avatar is launching as a premium PC title, and Mayya isn’t shy about where the money will come from first. “A lot of it will come from international,” he admits, pointing out this is hardly unique to studios. Even console giants developed in “major” markets pull a hefty share of sales from abroad, he explains, name-checking Lords of the Fallen, GTA and Black Myth: Wukong as fellow travellers on that road. But Mayya isn’t writing off the homeland just yet. He believes India is following a trajectory similar to China’s gaming market, albeit around 10-15 years behind, and expects PC and console gaming to steadily gain ground as the country’s gaming ecosystem matures. In his view, games like Unleash the Avatar are among the first wave of premium Indian titles that could help drive that shift. That long-term vision also shapes how the studio is approaching its launch strategy.

Console partnerships and platform exclusivity are subjects Mayya approaches cautiously. He’s aware of the trade-offs: sign an exclusivity deal with a platform and you might be locked out of PC for six months to a year, while a simultaneous launch across formats has worked brilliantly for some titles too. “It’s a little early to tell,” he says, leaving the door firmly ajar. As for a release date, don’t hold your breath just yet. “2027 for sure,” is as far as Mayya will commit, refusing to be pinned down further, because as he puts it, that depends entirely on the studio’s own development rhythm.

While the release date stays fuzzy, one thing is crystal clear: artificial intelligence isn’t writing this game’s code. Mayya has openly said the studio isn’t leaning on AI for development, and his reasoning is refreshingly unglamorous: it simply isn’t good enough yet. “It’s just not that good,” he says of the newer image models doing the rounds, adding that his team found it faster to render characters in Unreal Engine and touch up in Photoshop than wrestle with AI-generated art. Where AI does earn its keep is in the unglamorous back office: sorting emails, renaming files, occasional help with optimisation. Small stuff. Nothing creative, and definitely nothing near the code. Which brings us to the studio’s most quotable rule. Their lead engineer, apparently fed up with cleaning up algorithmic messes, laid down the law: “Nobody’s allowed to use Claude Code.” Not a suggestion, a decree. “It makes more of a mess,” Mayya explains, describing engineers left picking through the wreckage afterwards. His advice to anyone convinced this is an “AI-generated game” is blunt: go and try building one yourself with AI alone. “It’s never going to happen.”

With the release still some distance away, the conversation inevitably turns to what players have already seen in the game’s trailers, and the reactions they’ve sparked. No trailer survives the internet unscathed, and Unleash the Avatar‘s latest cut drew both applause and pointed criticism, particularly around its animation polish.  Mayya, a self-confessed lifelong Soulslike devotee, takes much of the feedback in stride. He owns up to a specific bit of “jankiness” in a move where the character hoists his mace, a flaw the team already knew about and simply ran out of time to fix. Where he finds feedback less useful is when it lacks specific examples. “When somebody comes in, gives a vague statement saying overall the combat doesn’t feel very fluid,” he says, he can’t help comparing it to the frame-by-frame clipping he’s personally spotted in far bigger, far more polished titles. He’s not naming names beyond the obvious genre giants, but the point lands anyway: nobody’s animations are as flawless as internet comments demand. As for the boss fight some called “too easy,” Mayya has the receipts. A recent playtest with roughly a hundred to two hundred players saw barely two or three actually beat it. The perceived slowness of the boss, meanwhile, is a deliberate design choice, not a bug, because a boss that snaps around instantly “looks fake.”

The discussion around the trailers has also fuelled assumptions about the game’s scale and ambitions, something Mayya is quick to address. If there’s one misconception Mayya is keen to clear up, it’s the AAA label being slapped onto his project by overenthusiastic fans, and the inevitable backlash that follows from sceptics. “We have never claimed AAA game,” he insists, pointing out the word appears nowhere in their marketing, thumbnails or titles. His own honest assessment: indie, aspiring to AA quality, built on a budget nowhere near Hollywood-sized gaming money. The scope, he says, was always meant to start small, closer to Mortal Shell territory, before growing game by game.

That grounded approach also shapes how Mayya thinks about some of the wider challenges facing the games industry. Piracy doesn’t worry him much either, borrowing a line from Gabe Newell’s old philosophy that piracy is fundamentally a service problem, not a moral one. Build something good enough, deliver it well enough, and people will simply pay for it. As for the studio’s future beyond this one game, Mayya sees a mix of sequels and fresh ideas, FromSoftware-style, building on the same action-RPG foundations while occasionally branching into new universes. For now though, all eyes are on the next trailer, which Mayya promises will mark another significant leap forward, inching the game closer to a release his fans are already impatiently counting down towards.