I recently got in touch with the team behind the newly announced Son of Thanjai, an upcoming open-world action-adventure game being developed by Ayelet Studio, an Indian studio based in Chennai. Ever since I learned about this project, I’ve been excited to explore what it has to offer from gameplay mechanics to team size, target audience, and more.
To get answers, I curated a list of questions and shared them with Venkata Subramanian Ravi, VP of Marketing at Ayelet Studio. He responded with precision and detail. Here’s everything I asked, and what they had to say.
1. Game Genre & Style
Son of Thanjai is a third-person, open-world action-adventure set in the 11th century Chola dynasty, centered around Thanjavur and its surrounding areas.
Combat is built around the Surul Vaal, a whip-like sword that lets players control space and chaos. A morale system ensures enemies lose the will to fight when they witness dismemberments and decapitations.
In stealth, you observe, isolate targets, bluff, lure, and exploit. More mechanics will be revealed in future updates.
2. Team Size
Ayelet Studio is a 30-person independent team, firmly indie, but on the larger side for India, they’ve been at this since 2022, run their own in-house motion capture, and shipped a smaller prologue title called Unsung Empires: The Cholas in 2024 before scaling up to Son of Thanjai.
3. Target Audience
The game is designed for two overlapping audiences:
The global action-adventure players, fans of Assassin’s Creed, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn.
Indian and diaspora players who’ve rarely seen themselves at the center of a globally released action game of this scale.
4. Vision & Player Experience
The studio aims to give India its own globally recognized warrior archetype akin to the Samurai, Ninja, or Knight.
For Indian players, it’s about finally seeing their own history rendered at blockbuster scale. For global players, it’s about discovering the richness of South Indian culture, much like Ghost of Tsushima introduced Japan.
The protagonist is a morally gray young prince who wins wars through patience and intelligence rather than brute force.
Players should feel like they’ve truly lived inside an 11th-century South Indian capital exploring markets, gambling villages, river docks, and traveling merchants alongside a clever, dangerous hero rooted in this world.
5. Language Options
As of now Tamil is only confirmed language but we can expect more updates later.
Additional Highlights
- Thanjavur has been built as a living city, not just a backdrop markets, festivals, and traders operate on their own routines independent of the player.
- The game will ship on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC (Steam + Epic).
- The studio is fully Chennai-based, with many team members rooted in Tamil-speaking regions whose history the game draws from.
My Take
I honestly found the trailer very interesting, it carries a charm that is often missing from Indian game trailers. Most of them tend to rely on pre-rendered footage, but this one shows real gameplay captured directly in the engine, which immediately impressed me. The world feels authentic and the combat looks well-built and smoothly executed, with no repetitive or glitchy animations. Stealth mechanics appear sharp, and the brutality is striking, from throwing weapons to crushing skulls, it all adds a raw intensity.
The whip-like weapon, the Surul Vaal, is especially exciting, the last time I experienced something similar was in Darksiders 3 and Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, and I can’t wait to see it brought to life in an Indian game.
Honestly, I’m very impressed by the trailer. Of course, there’s still room for improvement since the game is in development, but considering the small size of the team, what they’ve achieved so far looks incredibly promising. I truly can’t wait to get my hands on it. The game doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can already Wishlist it on Steam
0 Comments