Mukti: A Pathbreaking Indian Video Game Exploring The Grim Reality Of Human Trafficking

Arya is worried. She cannot contact her grandfather. In 'Mukti', a first-person exploration game developed by Mumbai-based underDOGS Studio, players step into her shoes as she enters her grandfather's museum in search of him and falls deeper into the rabbit hole that is human trafficking — one of the most urgent and often overlooked issues of our time. As players explore the museum's corridors, they uncover stories tracing the impact of trafficking across generations. This marks a significant moment for video games in India — both for game development in India and for how video games can be instrumental in giving voice to the marginalised.

From Tomb Raider 3 (1998) to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017), portrayals of India in video games have been bizarre at best. For too long, India has appeared in video games as an aesthetic flourish: a splash of colour' a crowded market; a dusty temple ruin. These depictions were almost always superficial — designed to exoticise rather than accurately represent the country and its people.

But Mukti marks a paradigm shift in how India is portrayed in video games. Rather than using India as a stage, the game places Indian experiences at the centre of its story. Its core mechanic — exploration through collective memory and material culture — becomes a metaphor for the very act of reclaiming narratives.

When playing as Arya, the granddaughter of an archaeologist navigating a museum filled with over a thousand artifacts tied to India's cultural and colonial history, what you're really doing is recovering silenced voices — many of them belonging to trafficking victims whose stories have been systematically erased or ignored.

Based on real accounts and historical research, the game is designed to raise awareness and provoke reflection. Coming soon to PlayStation 5 and PC, it offers an experience that uses interactivity to inform and challenge. According to the developers underDOGS Studio, each interaction within the game is designed to provoke empathy, spark dialogue and ignite change.

Part of this is due to the game's Indian authorship. Mukti is made by Indian creators who aren't translating their culture for Western consumption — they're speaking to and from their own socio-cultural context. Where earlier Western-made games reduced India to a collection of visual tropes or a peripheral mission setting, Mukti offers the specificity of language, objects, and histories. It asks players to engage with the ethical weight of 'being', instead of merely 'looking'.

Sony's India Hero Project (IHP) is an incubator programme by Sony Interactive Entertainment, which supported the game's development. The IHP reflects a structural shift in how global platforms are beginning to recognise creative labour outside the traditional centres of gaming power. Modeled after its China Hero Project, Sony's investment in Indian studios isn't just about expanding markets, it's about expanding narrative possibility. Mukti is one of several upcoming titles — alongside Fishbowl and Suri: The Seventh Note — that signal the emergence of a new wave of games grounded in local realities but designed to travel worldwide.

In that sense, Mukti is doing so much more than raising awareness about human trafficking. It's asserting the political and narrative agency of Indian developers within a medium that has long marginalized them. It uses the mechanics of exploration to reframe how we think about memory, trauma, and cultural heritage — not as static relics, but as contested spaces.

This matters because representation in video games is never just visual — it's loaded with questions about who gets to design the worlds we explore? Whose histories get rendered in code? For years, India's role in the global games industry was largely technical — outsourcing, support work, and mobile development. Story-rich, socially rooted, narrative-driven, and creator-led projects like Mukti used to be the rare exception, not the rule. But now, that's shifting. The tools are finally here. The stories have always been waiting to be told.

Learn more about Mukti here.

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