Indika Review

Summary

• Indika is a darkly humorous adventure game centered around a 19th-century nun in Russia.
• The game features surreal visuals, awkward controls, and a dissonant style that enhances the eerie atmosphere.
• Gameplay includes varied puzzles, unique moments, and a deep narrative with unexpected events, but can feel plain and dull.

For a seemingly dour art game excoriating religion, Indika is pretty funny. With its publishing duties handled by 11 bit studios, the small team at the now-Kazakhstan-based studio Odd Meter have devised a discomfiting surrealist dirge of an adventure game, one which matches exquisite moments and inventive visuals with jagged third-person exploration controls. Centered on a nun within the Russian Orthodox Church of the late 19th century, Indika presents a bleak tale stuffed with black humor. Amid the developing political reality surrounding Russia in the present day, the quest feels poignant, even while much of its messaging relies on subjective interpretation.

Citing filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Darren Aronofsky as inspirations, Indika’s dark humor and existential dialogue come off as artfully cinematic in its best moments. It’s the type of project one would expect to be encumbered by budgetary constraints, and its very existence as a fully-3D high-res adventure contemporizes the effects of its story, granting it the whiff of a luxurious AAA experience. The spell is continuously broken, however; sometimes by a clumsy chase sequence or unexpected death, other times by a confrontational sensibility desperate to elicit a response.

Get Thee To A Nunnery

Indika Stars A Complicated and Haunted 19th-Century Nun

Indika stars a soft-spoken, insecure, traumatized young nun relegated to a convent in a wintry region of Russia in the late 1800s. The very beginning finds her performing menial chores and suffering casual mistreatment by her peers, who disrespect and ignore her in equal measure. It’s a disorienting introduction, andthe player’s reaction to being tasked with gradually fetching buckets of water from a well for no clear reward will probably dictate how receptive they’ll be to the game’s use of dark humor and tedium.

Like many other aspects of Indika, these diversions appear deliberate and flagrantly game-like; there’s even an experience points system represented by pixelated numbers in the corner of the screen, connected to a tree of buffs that are never adequately explained and, frankly, amount to little. This dissonant style is a constant theme – the diverse, often angular soundtrack even careens off into chiptunes – possibly meant to demonstrate delusions of paranoid religious consequence, with Indika’s collection of points through prayer and deeds never alleviating her psychological torment.

She is suffering in other ways, surrounded by a sickly aura of feebleness, little helped by the dedicated “prayer” button. While often sad and acting forlorn, Indika can be alternately inventive and determined. It coheres into a strain towards being a good person, with her guilt-strewn past slowly unraveled through the four or so hours needed to beat the game. Indika’s story is such that blind faith in its tellers is required to follow along, with the player guided through most of the proceedings by the nose, unable to change any of the horribleness which lies therein.

The Unreliable Narrator’s Unreliable Narrator

Indika’s Inner Voice Is As Mean As Its Controls

The call to adventure is proffered after a delightfully odd hallucinatory sequence during communion, and Indika is quickly evicted by the convent to deliver a secret letter some great distance. Once completely alone, players get better acquainted with the voice in her head, an entity/hallucination most comparable to Dustin Hoffman’s appearance in Luc Besson’s The Messenger. Whether a manifestation of the devil, doubt, fear, or some other unpleasant concern, he’s a constant intrusive companion on Indika’s journey, which takes her to snowy hinterlands, wrecked war-torn villages, and warped industrial hellscapes.

As an existential piece peppered with surrealist agitprop,
Indika
feels successfully distinct.

Movement can be twitchy and running is a sluggish affair, with some play areas minuscule and others dauntingly massive, like a bizarre fish-canning factory full of larger-than-life industrial contraptions. Indika’s background in engineering is revealed early on, which makes her well suited to the seat of a charming steam-powered bicycle or a forklift to maneuver massive cans and create makeshift steps.

Interact According To Intuition

Indika’s Puzzle Mechanics May Be Simple, But They Rarely Repeat Themselves

Most of Indika’s various gameplay segues are never repeated, even moments as minor as balancing carefully on a beam over a deadly fall. They are also simple to a fault and, as a result, rarely interesting on their own. Outside of a special set of spacial puzzle sequences which involve prayer – one of several high points in terms of gameplay and spectacle – Indika’s minute-to-minute interactivity is often plain and dull, full of awkwardly slow navigation through gloomy environments.

Maybe this causes the special moments to shine yet brighter, because it’s uncommon to find a game whose measured narrative can lead to such unexpected and fascinating events and entanglements. There’s a solid drama amid the wilder beats defined by how players interact as Indika in her world, and the context and culture of the historic Russian backdrop continually supports and surprises the best elements of the story being told. Indika is sad, hilarious, ugly, and disarming, often within the span of minutes, right before a player flatly drops into an abyss and reloads at a checkpoint.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

3.5/5, “Very Good” By Screen Rant’s Scale

It’s frankly difficult to describe Indika without spoiling most of what makes it so distinct. As a piece of art, it’s delicately odd, even while being a clumsy game to control at the best of times. The goofy arms-flailing falling animation of the main character looks like classic 90s 3D gaming jank, and the invisible walls and simplistic puzzles frequently add a sense of unpolishedness to the game’s feel.

That these aspects do not come across as accidental compromises speaks to Indika’s wider objectives and grasps at profundity. There are gasp-inducing moments – a non-explicit scene of sexual assault is especially shocking – as well as bouts of crass humor and violence. The game’s otherworldly qualities add distance between the player and events, though, which infuses the sobering darkness of the story with a fable-like energy, complete with an unreliable narrator who effectively carries a second unreliable narrator in their head.

As an existential piece peppered with surrealist agitprop, Indika feels successfully distinct. There’s even something convincingly personal about the story that ably cuts a path through its weirdness, a core built around toxic romantic relationships. None of its decisions and ideas seem beholden to interference, but like an original concept produced with integrity and personality. Even if stretches of Indika may not be “fun” in the conventional sense, it’s an intimate and stimulating experience that sticks around long after it’s over.

Screen Rant
was provided with a digital PC code for the purpose of this review.