Aikyam Demo Preview | An Unabashedly Joyful Celebration of Bollywood and Community
- Jenny Windom
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
One of my favorite RPG tropes is when we begin our adventures in the world with a festival to help get settled in, and Aikyam’s demo captures those feelings of anticipation and happiness that I love when games kick off with a party. It gets us invested in the characters as we see them having fun, we get to familiarize ourselves with the traditions of the world, and it immediately sets up stakes for what we’ll eventually feel compelled to protect.
Following this tradition, Aikyam’s (approximately) 50 minute prologue available now on Steam allows us to meet some key characters, explore a portion of the titular village, and dabble in the Holi festivities. We also take time to help villagers in need of a little more joy through turn-based battles set within our mental mindscape, where the world is a stage, our community cheers us on, and conflicts are settled. This demo, available now on Steam, is a delightful peek into what I believe will be a heartwarming adventure: Aikyam invites everyone who jumps into its prologue to embrace a world where you can sway even the most stubborn folks with kindness and a well-timed dance move.
Twas the Day Before Holi
As the demo begins, Vishva dreams of winding paths and facing an all-powerful demon with fiery, glowing eyes. After a jarring loss in this dreamscape – and loud wake-up call from Garuji, his mentor and teacher – Vishva wakes to a giggling classroom of fellow students. Garuji, attempting to maintain a respectable history lesson amidst the excitement of the upcoming Holi festivities realizes everyone is much too excited for the Razzle Dazzle Tournament and the prospect of throwing colorful gulal balls (balloons filled with paint). Garuji decides to dismiss class to provide an opportunity for Vishva and the others to enjoy the day and train up.
The sidewalks are painted vibrant colors, the leaves are green, and the world feels ready for a celebration: it’s almost Holi, after all! In case you’re unfamiliar, Holi – a real-world tradition – is the festival of colors and love, signifying the triumph of good over evil and the arrival of Spring. The early moments of running around were fun: there were chests to open (filled with Karma, a collectible currency that we didn’t end up using in the demo), peacocks to pet, leaves fluttering as you move through foliage, and most characters are round and egg-like, very evocative of collectible chibi figurines that you get from blind boxes. I enjoyed their adorable proportions contrasting with the more realistically modeled environment.
As you explore outside of the school, meeting villagers and getting your bearings, you learn that dance is used as a form of conflict resolution among villagers. This dancing occurs in a person’s “Mind Theater” where they can “razzle and dazzle the hearts of many”.
Razzle Dazzle ‘Em
How exactly does one razzle and dazzle? In Aikyam, changing the hearts of disgruntled villagers – aka “razzle and dazzle” – is done through turn-based dance battles. While we didn’t get the opportunity to try basic attacks, defending, or using items in this demo, we did focus on honing our special dance attack techniques.
Dance moves – and the opportunity to defend against dance moves – are enhanced through quick-time reactions. Your dance moves also have celestial elements associated, like the sun and the earth, so you can also pay attention to your opponents weaknesses to deal even more damage on top of hitting your timing correctly. Even better? Breaking all of your opponents weaknesses will stun them, buying you even more time to strategize and act. Each move comes with its own animated scene, immersing you in a Bollywood style moment, mimicking the ways that – in many Bollywood tales – conflict is often worked through using song and dance.
As a dancer, I appreciated the fidelity towards recreating and being inspired by actual dance movements and choreography. While it took me a handful of imperfect hits, through repetition, I got comfortable with the moves of each character. The timing isn’t too punishing, but it definitely requires paying attention, as some of the audio and visual cues happen quickly, sometimes without very clear signalling. While hitting “Perfect” on the timing can feel a bit overwhelming initially, I found it only took a few tries to settle into a groove as I got familiar with the rhythms and cadence of each move. I’m looking forward to seeing the breadth of choreography represented in the full game!
An additional element in these dance battles is the ability to recruit villagers to essentially act as your Mind Theater “hype squad”. In the demo, you’re able to recruit a villager after completing his side quests, adding him to your bench. It looks like you’ll eventually have up to six community members allowed in your bench in addition to your main party of three. As you hit the timing on dance attacks, villagers get more and more hyped with Cheer Energy, filling the Star Meter at the top of the screen. When filled, it allows you to do even bigger and more powerful moves, and eventually villagers even take their own turns to help impact the flow of the battle, providing you with attack buffs, healing, and more.
In these battles, I felt I understood the loop of the game as a whole, where the side quests you complete to help out villagers feels more rewarding because of the villager inclusion in the hype squad. I appreciate how this game feels like it’ll tie in NPCs beyond a quick dialogue moment or fetch quest, reinforcing the overall themes of community and unity. Sure, one person potentially could go at it alone, but why not ask for help from those around you?
From the upbeat music and dance-inspired attack animations, to the film strip stylized turn-counter, and even the Bollywood inspired victory screen at the end of the battles, these encounters are full of delightful details that reinforce the game’s cultural inspirations and themes of community and working together.
Winning the “You-Sized” Jalebi
In the second portion of the demo, Vishva, Guruji, and Ramli – the third addition to your group and Vishva’s best friend – arrive late to Holi and miss out on snagging tickets to the Razzle Dazzle dance tournament! As you stand at the ticket booth to see what can be done, you encounter the main antagonist for the demo, Jaya, an elder who’s both hoping to snag a dance with Guruji (oh la la) but who’s also taken the last three tickets and clearly is trying to stack the competition so she hangs onto her win streak! Challenging her to a preliminary dance battle snags you one ticket to enter, but to get the remaining two, you’ll need to explore the village further and find folks to help out.
Exploration doesn’t take you too far from your starting area in this demo – you’ll spend nearly the whole time running around the village marketplace – and the quests that you complete reinforce and expand upon the mechanics that we’ve already been working on: turn-based dance battles and aiming (and throwing) the colorful balloons at mischievous kids around town.
It was neat to feel immersed in the village, doing small acts of kindness with folks, and it made me wonder how much variety we can anticipate in the gameplay as the game progresses. Will other games or traditions around Holi be introduced as mini-games or mechanics to interact with the world, or will we primarily focus on utilizing the gulal balloons and turn-based dance battles? I also am very curious about the scale of exploration throughout the full game: will we be sticking close to this village? We didn’t get a chance to see beyond the marketplace, but I am very intrigued and look forward to seeing what’s in store.
With the two tickets in hand, the final test begins: a two-part battle against Jaya and her team. After winning the “you-sized jalabi” (a delectable sweet treat) for Garuji, it’s time to enjoy the rest of Holi…but in the very final moments of the demo, the celebrations are brought to a halt with the appearance of demons, concluding the story for now.
Demos are a work in progress, but there are small nitpicks I noted while playing: movement, especially on the smaller screen of the Steam Deck, currently feels a bit slippery and glide-y (although this felt less so while playing on desktop). I appreciated that characters involved in sidequests had blue dialogue boxes to clearly indicate what would happen if you chatted with them, but wished there was a way to differentiate between folks you’ve talked with who repeat text you’ve already seen versus others who may have more to say. As a whole, though, this game feels promising to me, both through its battle system and the narrative.
Aikyam Means “One”
Setting this game – one about resolving interpersonal conflicts through dance and uniting the community after disaster strikes – right around the Holi festivities really helps drive home its themes, even to someone like me who is less familiar with these traditions. Even the meaning of the village name, Aikyam (which means “One”) reinforces the idea of sticking together and helping one another out as your strengths and means allow.
It’s refreshing, especially as someone who did not grow up with Indian folklore, to experience a fantasy world inspired by tales and traditions from this part of the world, and I feel invited to learn more about the real world cultures, foods, and legends of India as I played this demo…both to gain a deeper understanding because it’s neat to learn more about the world around us, but also because I feel like this game embeds so much of this inspiration throughout its structure that it’ll only deepen my understanding and appreciation of what the team is creating here.
At the very least, while I eagerly await the full game coming soon to Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series, I will be doing my best to find some jalabi (even though it may not be “me-sized”), as it sounds delicious!
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