Indika is unlike any game I’ve ever played. Developer Odd Meter takes a familiar concept — a young nun struggling with her faith — and runs wild with it, using well-worn gameplay tropes to provide fascinating ruminations on theology.
I’m hesitant to say much more because going in dark, as I did, is the best way to experience this game. But for those who want a bit more information, I’ll elaborate.
In the third-person adventure game, you play as Indika, an ostracized Orthodox nun in an alternate Russia who is sent by the Church to deliver a mysterious letter. Along the way, she meets Ilya, an escaped prisoner who clings to his own religious beliefs as he’s slowly dying from a gangrenous arm, and decides to help him.
But what could have been a fairly rote heroic road trip becomes something far more interesting due to Indika’s other travel companion, the Devil himself. And unlike a lot of popular nun stories, which lean into horrific demonic imagery, Indika‘s depiction of Satan is far more playful, a Rumpelstiltskin-like figure who constantly questions the Church’s teachings.
This results in some thought-provoking questions being raised about the likes of sin, suffering and identity. And because these theological quandaries are centred around three characters with their own viewpoints, Indika commendably explores the shades of grey in between everything. As someone who has often had a cynical view of religion due to overbearing and hypocritical family members, I appreciated Odd Meter’s more nuanced exploration of faith that doesn’t provide easy answers or devolve into simple platitudes about religion being either “good” or “bad.”
Adding even more texture to the entire four-hour experience is a rich sense of dark humour and surreal imagery throughout. Indika sees a little chubby man run out of a sister’s mouth. A pair of soldiers nonchalantly talk to a man who’s been impaled by rebar. Abnormally large architecture and animals lend an almost Odyssean feeling to Indika’s quest. An RPG-like progression system that rewards you with glowing points and chiptune to level up attributes like guilt and grief, which have no actual bearing on the gameplay but further touch on the neverending pursuit of piety. Odd Meter deftly uses all of this absurdity to balance the more serious narrative and thematic beats, which become particularly heavy in the final hour.
Indika also uses its often rudimentary gameplay to enhance its religious themes in some impressively clever ways. In one early scene, Indika is instructed to fill and deliver buckets of water in one particular way, a laborious task that the Devil dryly points out is inefficient. Later on, Indika has to ascend a seemingly neverending tower while weighing the sin of reading a private letter, leading the Devil to challenge her to quantify the act relative to a series of supposedly “greater” sins.
But the most brilliant bit of gameplay that best illustrates her crisis of faith comes during a few sequences in which the Devil’s thoughts become overwhelming, leading the world, which is normally represented through a muted grey palette, to be torn asunder in eerie red hues. It’s in these moments that you have to direct Indika to alternate between praying and absorbing these thoughts to shift the world back and forth and clear a path, and it makes for a compelling mechanical representation of a young woman’s inner conflict and the importance of curiosity.
Not all of Indika is as inspired, however. Some minigames, like controlling painfully clunky cranes or vehicles to clear a path for Indika and Ilya, feel like padding, while others, such as when you’re being chased by a nightmarish dog, have frustrating “instant death” fail states. Even the sporadic flashback sequences, which are delightfully represented through striking retro-inspired pixel art, have tedious platforming challenges that get in the way of the otherwise intriguing revelations these sections provide about what led Indika to join the Church.
Thankfully, those annoyances aren’t enough to detract from everything that Indika does right. It’s a game that blends quirky humour, tried-and-true gameplay conventions and a riveting religious narrative to create a wholly unique interactive experience. You’ll definitely want to put your faith in this one.
Indika is now available on PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam).
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