INDIKA is a third-person adventure game where you play the titular Indika, a nun who is battling with her faith as well as her place in the Monastery she lives in. She sets off to find her purpose and to discover what she values in life all while being accompanied by the voice of the Devil in her head. Mind-bending and genre-defying are the two most apt descriptors I can think of when trying to discuss INDIKA. This game has a lot to say during its roughly four hour campaign.
The opening section of the game is monotonous by design. You are berated by your superiors and forced into doing simple tasks around the Monastery that feel small and insignificant. One such task involves walking to a well with a bucket to bring some water to a fellow nun. This must be repeated five times. The first time you think to yourself, “Wow, this is slow. Is there a run button?” And then you realize that you’re stuck at your slow walk and then you really do have to do this task five full times. Each time you finish a lap you get a nice pixelated indicator and sound effect letting you know to keep going. Every small task is rewarded with experience points, and it almost feels as though Indika is gamifying her life to keep herself from going completely insane. I kept anticipating a jumpscare, or some sort of interruption, but no, I just kept filling the bucket with water.
Eventually the Devil says “Useless labour is the basis of spiritual development,” implying that in order to strengthen your faith, you must do some boring and inconsequential work for the church. Doing this over and over again gameplay-wise is not interesting or fun… at all – but it’s necessary in this journey to illustrate why exactly Indika feels her faith is wavering. Is she doing work to further her bond with God, or is she doing this work to make the lives of the nuns that she resents easier? This particular part of the opening section of the game had me realizing I was in for a very interesting experience.
Early into Indika’s journey you meet a man named Ilya, an escaped convict who is in really bad shape. He genuinely looks like a person who’s been dead for a couple weeks who just decided he’s going to get up and start living again. Ilya explains to Indika that he has been talking to God and that there is a divine plan set in place for him and it’s all coming true. This is a very interesting juxtaposition given that Indika has been regularly speaking internally with the Devil and is ultimately unsure if she has any faith in God to begin with. Because of her lack of faith in God, she looks at Ilya as a crazy person. This relationship feels like something straight out of an art-house movie. It’s not a sort of thing you typically see represented in a video game, so I found this relationship to be something I clung onto throughout the whole journey. I began to care about Ilya and his plight – curious as to what happened to him prior to meeting our protagonist.
Ilya’s stone cold faith in God is often ironically questioned by Indika. She questions if free will exists when the god who gave us that will only expects us to act in a certain way. In one great section, the Devil asks Indika to quantify sins by comparing them to others. She suggests opening and reading a letter not meant for her is a sin. To which the Devil asks, “how many opened letters does it take to make you as bad as a murderer?” Indika had always been told sinning was wrong, but the Devil makes a point. Can you even look at opening a letter and killing someone to be on the same level of sin? These are the hard hitting questions INDIKA confronts you with.
There are several instances in the game where you are shown flashbacks of Indika’s past. These sections of the game depart from the realistic, muddy graphics and muted colours and move into a gorgeous pixelated colour heavy palette. These little sections are essentially different mini-games that exist to push the story forward and teach you a little bit more about Indika’s past, as well as how it reflects what is currently happening in the story. You start to understand why Indika might feel the way she does and why she is drawn to Ilya, a man who – on the surface – is so not the type of person Indika would associate herself with. These small sections of the game are stunning, and almost serve as a reminder that you are in fact playing a video game, and not piloting an absurdist art-house film. Something I really love about the blending of genres and art styles is that they blend together completely in the regular realistic setting of the game.
The music through INDIKA is reminiscent of SNES days. The music is often quite chiptune-y and feels like it’s straight out of a retro game. The clashing of the game’s often bleak visual presentation and the music’s upbeat synth heavy soundtrack make for a confusing feast for the eyes and ears to behold. However it works so spectacularly and carries itself so confidently that I never once found myself questioning its implementation.
THIS NEXT SECTION COULD BE CONSIDERED SPOILERS ABOUT CHARACTER PROGRESSION. THIS IS YOUR WARNING.
Throughout INDIKA, you collect these little golden rings that add to a counter on the top left of your screen. You start the game with roughly 1,200 of them, and you only collect a few hundred more throughout the game by doing various tasks, or completing puzzles, or simply finding them littered around the world. Each time you surpass the number listed on the screen you gain a new level. The leveling system in INDIKA is strange and unlike any system of its kind I’ve ever seen. Each time you level up you are given the option as to how you want to spend that level. Do you want to get an additional 10 experience right now? Or do you want to add an additional 16 experience the next time you level up? How about a 1.4 multiplier for your next level? Weird… right?
You start the game at level 8, and there are already decisions made on the level tree when you first gain a level. It’s also important to mention that each of the sections of the leveling graph you can choose to put your points in have very negative names. You can put a level into shame, repentance, regret, and guilt, to name a few. It’s not like there’s any combat in this game, so there are no abilities to upgrade for combat. There isn’t any crazy traversal, so you’re not upgrading your movement. You just keep upgrading the amount of experience you can get in the future. I’ve never seen a more enigmatic leveling system in a video game.
Usually upgrading your stats is a good thing and makes you more of a force to reckon with, but that isn’t the case here. This furthers my theory about Indika gamifying her life to give it more purpose as a faith-questioning nun. She feels as though her reason to be on this earth might not be what she always thought it was, and in order to escape this way of life she has essentially locked herself into, she must find additional purpose. However the purpose she puts on herself proves to be about as fulfilling as her dwindling faith in God. When taking all of this into consideration, it really makes the end of the game stand out in such an incredible way.
SPOILER SECTION OVER.
Given how absurd everything in this game is, it’s hard to tell what is real, what is embellished, and what is tangible. When looking around the world everything seems sort of regular and nothing feels out place. That sense of normalcy only lasts for so long until you start to notice that there are some really fucking wild things happening in the environment around you. Each animal in the game is absolutely gargantuan in size. While it could just a design choice to further the elements of absurdism, I feel like there could be more to it. Perhaps animals are free of sin and judgement and they make Indika feel small? Could it be that they are normal size and she cannot see them that way? Are all animals in this world actually dozens of times larger than they really are? There is a section of the game where you see varying sizes of fish. Some of them are small, some the size of people, some the size of skyscrapers. Fish lack nervous systems and have extremely low brain capacity, meaning their idea to even comprehend sin or more complex human structures is as low it can possibly get. Is that why there are so many absurdly massive fish? Are they so free of sin that they are so much bigger to our protagonist? Who can say? I think these questions we never really get answers to made for a more captivating and thought provoking experience.
Look, INDIKA isn’t going to be for everyone. A game about a nun clashing with her faith while being spoken to by the devil accompanied by a God obsessed convict probably won’t resonate with the masses. I think if you’re a fan of art-house cinema, classic Russian literature, or religious fiction, INDIKA will blow your mind. It’s hard to find a game like this that doesn’t spend all its time pontificating and trying to make you feel one way or the other. INDIKA stands on its own merit and storytelling and allows the player to take what they will from it. I found the ending to be poignant and moving in a way I haven’t experienced in recent memory. There were many moments where I found myself picking my jaw up off the floor and just wanted a second to take in what I had just seen. I was laughing a lot, I was cringing a lot, and I was also often disgusted by what was being displayed.
Art is supposed to be challenging and art is supposed to be divisive. There are certainly some people who will find this game to be offensive and blasphemous. But there will also be people who resonate with this game on a level I cannot even comprehend. Some people might feel so strongly after they’ve played it that they decide to walk away from their faith. This dichotomy is what makes INDIKA stand out to me as a special game and a special experience that should really only be experienced by people who are willing to stare it in the face and take it for what it is. While the fun factor may be at a 0/10, the impact and lasting effect INDIKA had on me personally, is a 10/10. Easily one of my favourite bite-sized indie experiences I have played in a long, long time.
