Games Drawn From Asian Landscapes and History

Video games have drawn on Asian landscapes and history for decades, but the quality and depth of that engagement have shifted considerably in recent years. Where earlier games often borrowed surface aesthetics, bamboo forests, pagodas, cherry blossoms, without genuine engagement with culture or history, a generation of more thoughtful titles has arrived that treat Asian settings with actual research and specificity. The results are some of the most distinctive environments in contemporary gaming, and they have changed what players expect from games that claim historical or geographic inspiration.

Ghost of Tsushima and Sekiro: Japan on Its Own Terms

Ghost of Tsushima, released by Sucker Punch Productions in 2020, is set on the island of Tsushima during the Mongol invasion of 1274. The game is made by an American studio, which is worth acknowledging directly, because it affects how to evaluate the authenticity of its representation. What Sucker Punch did that distinguished Ghost of Tsushima from many of its predecessors was hire a substantial Japanese cast, work with cultural consultants, commission an original Japanese-language score from Ilan Erzulli and Shigeru Umebayashi, and build an entire Japanese-language mode that was not a dubbed afterthought but was treated as a primary experience.

The reception in Japan was notably warm. The game sold over a million copies in Japan alone within its first few months and was granted a formal tribute from the real island of Tsushima, where it boosted tourism measurably. That response does not settle every question about who gets to tell these stories, but it does suggest that the makers engaged with their subject carefully enough to earn genuine appreciation from the culture they were representing.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, from FromSoftware, takes a different approach because it comes from inside Japan. The game is set in a fictionalised late Sengoku period and draws on Japanese mythology, spiritual practice, and historical martial culture with an intimacy that reflects an internal perspective. The enemies include figures drawn from Buddhist and Shinto traditions. The landscapes reference real areas of Honshu. The spiritual logic of resurrection and death that drives the gameplay is grounded in Japanese concepts of the afterlife and karmic consequence. FromSoftware does not explain these references for a Western audience because they were not making the game for a Western audience first.

Chinese Mythology, Indian Settings, and Himalayan Terrain

Black Myth: Wukong, released in 2024 by Game Science, is the highest-profile game drawn from Chinese mythology in the history of the medium. Based on the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, the game renders locations from Chinese Buddhist geography with extraordinary visual fidelity. The Mount Huaguo sequences reference real landscape traditions in Chinese ink painting. The character designs draw on centuries of theatrical and sculptural tradition. The game sold 10 million copies in its first three days and prompted serious discussion in China about the country's position in the global game industry.

Games drawing on Indian settings and mythology have been slower to emerge at comparable scale, but the groundwork is visible. Several smaller studios have worked with stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The landscape traditions of Rajasthan and Kerala have appeared in mobile and indie titles. The challenge for these games is that Indian mythology is extraordinarily complex, regionally varied, and has not had the kind of international popular culture moment that Japanese martial history or Chinese folklore has had. That will change as Indian development studios grow in size and ambition.

Himalayan settings have been used in several titles, most often as a backdrop for exploration and survival rather than a vehicle for cultural engagement. The landscape itself, high-altitude passes, glaciated peaks, traditional architecture in Ladakh and Bhutan, offers visual material that few game environments have fully exploited. Organisations covering Himalayan culture and geography, such as Asian World Kashmir, document the specificity of these regions in ways that could genuinely inform game designers looking to move beyond generic mountain aesthetics toward something more grounded in the actual landscapes and cultures of the region.

Jade Empire, BioWare's 2005 action RPG, is worth acknowledging as an early attempt to build a game world from Chinese-influenced mythology and geography. It was imperfect and drew on a pan-Asian aesthetic that blurred distinctions between very different cultural traditions. But it was one of the first major Western-developed titles to put Chinese-derived mythology at the centre rather than the margin of its world-building. Its flaws are instructive: the blurring of distinct Asian cultures into a single generic "Eastern" setting is the error that more recent titles have worked hard to avoid.

Authenticity, Representation, and Who Gets to Build These Worlds

The question of who gets to make games set in Asian landscapes and history is not going away, and it should not. Ghost of Tsushima's warm reception does not mean that all non-Japanese studios making games set in Japan will produce comparable work. It means that one studio invested heavily enough in the cultural details to earn trust. That investment involved specific decisions: language, casting, research, consultation. Studios that skip those steps and import the aesthetics without the effort produce something different, and audiences are increasingly capable of identifying the difference.

The emergence of studios based in Japan, China, South Korea, and increasingly India changes the landscape. When FromSoftware, Game Science, or a South Korean studio makes a game rooted in their own history, the question of authority is answered differently than when it must be negotiated by an external developer. The next decade of games drawing on Asian history and landscape will involve a larger proportion of internally produced work, and the quality expectations that work sets will raise the bar for everyone.

For CS2 players, the relevance of this conversation might seem distant. But the communities built around competitive gaming increasingly intersect with the communities around broader gaming culture, and games like Ghost of Tsushima attract CS2 players during off-season breaks more than most. Our strategy games off-season article covers what CS2 players tend to reach for between ranked sessions, and culturally rich single-player games appear there as regularly as strategy titles.