Twelve landmarks, one journey: the real places that illustrate Akshara
Charminar, Golconda, the Ramappa Temple, Borra Caves, Lepakshi — why a word game set its chapters at real Indian heritage sites, and what is true about each painting.
By the Akshara team · Published 2026-09-26 · All articles
Most puzzle games decorate their levels with abstract themes — gems, gardens, galaxies. Akshara's chapters instead travel through real places: the heritage landmarks of Telugu-speaking India and beyond, each painted for the game in a warm watercolor style, each paired with a fact about the place in English, Telugu and Hindi. This was a deliberate early decision, and players ask about it enough that it deserves its own page.
Why real places
Akshara is a language game, and a language does not float free — it lives somewhere. The Telugu a player is building on the wheel is the Telugu spoken under the Charminar and carved into temple inscriptions at Lepakshi. Setting the journey at real landmarks keeps that connection visible: you are not clearing "World 3", you are walking from Hyderabad's old city toward the Godavari. Families told us early on that the scenes started conversations — a grandmother explaining to a child that she had actually stood inside Golconda's acoustics gallery — and that settled the question for good.
The journey's shape
The journey opens at the Charminar, the 1591 icon of Hyderabad, because that is where a Telugu-first game should begin. From there it moves through Golconda Fort, whose hand-clap echoes carry to the citadel a kilometre away; the Ramappa Temple at Palampet, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose bricks are light enough to float on water; the painted ceilings of Lepakshi with their hanging pillar; the million-year-old Borra Caves in the Araku hills; and onward through sites players may not have met before — which is rather the point. Each chapter's fact is short, checked, and written in all three languages of the game; the full illustrated list lives on the Heritage page.
About the paintings
The scene art is original artwork created for Akshara and owned by its studio — not stock imagery and not photographs. The paintings deliberately favor early-morning and dusk light, when these places are at their quietest, and small liberties of composition are taken the way a plein-air painter would take them: the Charminar's street is emptier than any real Saturday would allow. The facts, by contrast, take no liberties — where a claim like Ramappa's floating bricks is on the label, it is because the archaeological record supports it.
A small invitation
If the game ever puts a scene in front of you and you think "I have been there" — or better, "I could go" — the art has done its job. Several of these landmarks are an easy day trip from Hyderabad or Visakhapatnam, and none of them charge more than a cinema ticket. The game is a door; the places are real. See all twelve landmarks →