Indika took a first-class seat on the hype train after 2024’s Steam Next Fest, showcasing a stark and surreal psychological adventure game where the player takes on the role of a nineteenth-century Russian nun who has the devil himself living in her head. Like many others, I immediately wishlisted the game, and eagerly booted it up within hours of the initial release.

From the start, it’s a weird thematic mix of out-of-vogue themes engaged through a modern lens, presenting from the outset like a lesser-known A24 film that you’ll inevitably remember even if you can’t decide how you feel about it. In the best way, the game adapts perfectly to these expectations, balancing bizarre intrigue with immediate trust that the story you are about to witness will resonate.

Once Upon a Time In Not-Our-Russia

In Indika, the player starts out falling, a 16-bit nun clumsily steering through a 2-D backdrop toward growing stars while inverted castles drift by in the background. The stars grow, the music swells, and at once you are transported to a fully-rendered 19th-century prayer circle where a young nun has just bumped into a flaming brazier, almost upending it. She is dragged out of the room, a smartly-used follow-cam shot adding to the player’s sense of bewilderment, and sent on an errand, crossing a snow-covered yard while Lucifer himself provides chiding narration about temptation, chastity, and fate. Later, Indika has a moment of panic after seeing a tiny man emerge from an elder sister’s mouth during a ceremony, and this outburst seals her fate: she is tasked with delivering a letter to a distant location and sets about the journey which will see her depart the convent indefinitely.

All That and a Giant Fish

The narrative style of Indika is its most memorable aspect: equally dark and comedic, Indika navigates an alternate-history 19th-century Russian setting where the hallmarks are soldiers, conflict, tribulation, and uncertainty about what it all ultimately means. Threats to the young nun, both implied and overt, are regular occurrences, and the impression is that of a defenseless woman moving through a very dangerous world, perhaps only by the grace of God.

Providing sharp contrast to this solemn narrative backdrop are elements which feel wholly out-of-place, and that very intentionally undermine the drama: ambient notes and audio cues which are indicative of a much more casual game, perhaps a platformer or Metroidvania, something very far from the psychological story playing out before you. To build upon this discord, Indika acquires experience points by completing mundane tasks, eventually gaining new traits of questionable application and value.

I feared for a moment that this is just going to be some sort of banal take on the absurdity of video games, but when a title card tells me that points are pointless, and I trust it, feeling relieved. The juxtaposed structural elements serve to keep the player guessing, unsure how seriously they should take the philosophical and occasionally disturbing material presented on screen. For me, I don’t know that my feelings ever quite settled into something concrete, but at least for the first few hours, I knew I was having a lot of fun.

Indika frequently engages with the demonic narrator in her head, arguing with him at length on the nature of doubt, reason, sin, and logic in ways that feel appropriately scaled to an arthouse-style video game. While this is generally a cool concept, occasionally the devil felt too clever by half, and was more an impish contrarian than clever deceiver or purveyor of knowledge. I suppose this fits the orthodox (no pun intended) attitude of the era, but I wonder if there’s a missed trick in conceiving of an adversary who was a bit less irksome and a bit more interesting.

Indika goes about her journey, soon crossing the path of Ilya, a soldier and escaped prisoner. They both have a deep interest in God, with Indika’s faith and understanding being more pragmatic and searching, while Ilya himself carries the wide-eye belief that miracles are in their midst, and he is, in fact, a vessel of such. The two banter and debate back and forth through the remainder of the journey, never truly sparring but often throwing sparks, and they make for the kudets, a religious artifact that can purportedly heal physical complications and afflictions in the hope of finding resolution to their palaver.

Hex Crank and Throttle Lock

The gameplay in Indika alternates between narrative explorations on the philosophical and religious themes and real-world puzzles, where the nun seeks to navigate obstacles which are typically a touch outlandish and exaggerated representations of mundane things. The most interesting of these are those where the world splits apart and the devil in her head hurls questions about her faith and desires as Indika navigates the blood-red world where the ground is rent asunder, silencing Old Scratch with prayers of her own to close or open certain paths. It’s a feature difficult to articulate but marvelous to behold, and in these sequences are some of the game’s strongest moments.

Other puzzles are less striking, but all reasonably engaging and fairly simple. I am not a big puzzle game person, but I managed to figure all of these out with little trouble. There are also flashback sequences told in 16-bit sequences that detail Indika’s life before the convent, and while these serve to provide meaningful and interesting backstory, they can be touch frustrating for those of us who don’t enjoy platforming/timing games. All of these elements are forgiving, so it’s hard to gripe too much and I suspect most players will find them more worthwhile than I did.

The pacing gets a bit strange in the latter half of the game though, and I felt some distinct puzzle fatigue in later stretches, wanting nothing more than for Ilya and Indika to engage in some half-hearted deliberation about the mercy of God or something to provide a reprieve from puzzles. Some players have complained about the short four-or-five-hour playtime of Indika, but given its limited scope, I think the runtime is just about right.

Sound and Fury?

Indika presents some really interesting explorations in its narrative, consciously cutting against its initially effective story with out-of-place elements that keep it from feeling too melodramatic. That said, I’m not sure it ever really accomplishes anything other than discord, as there is no endgame or conclusion. The musings on faith, freewill, religion, etc. are sophomoric, not moving toward anything or creating something readily articulable. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, but I found it unsatisfying and hollow, so much intellectual fumbling with no completed work.

The game also feels very uneven, with the polish and meatier engagements between Indika and Lucifer coming early in the game, and the latter half of the title being somewhat bloated by space-filling puzzles and sojourns through absurdist spaces. I acknowledge this complaint fits with the conscious engagement of video-gamey elements, but not to any purpose I can recognize.

Final Thoughts

Indika throws a lot of cool things at the wall, but too little of it sticks, creating a mess of elements which work in a proof-of-concept but fail in a full game. While the narrative and storytelling are capable of moments of intrigue and even greatness, the game itself is a thematic skeleton where nothing substantial ever came to be. It succeeded in pulling me in, but didn’t do a great job of keeping me there. That said, there were enough exceptional elements that I am eager to see what Odd Meter/11-bit studios do next.

The game engages in a lot of half-baked philosophizing, and the hyper-conscious video game veneer comes to nothing of substance. There are simple puzzles, but these largely feel like time-fillers, rounding out the theme of being horribly conscious about video game mechanics and the melodrama of mingling gameplay elements with dramatic storytelling, but I don’t know there’s ever a coherent thesis that emerges, and in the end it kind of feels like experimentation for its own sake.

Score: 5.7

Strengths

Pretty graphics, interesting premise
Strong, satisfying early chapters
Unflinching exploration of human elements

Weaknesses

Absurdist elements feel directionless
Feels like a proof-of-concept
All narrative and no story

Indika is available on Steam, PS5, and Xbox.

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Game Review: Indika (2024)

Once Upon a Time In Not-Our-Russia

All That and a Giant Fish

Hex Crank and Throttle Lock

Sound and Fury?

Final Thoughts

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