What is Indika? If you’ve been around the same corners of the internet I have, you’ve probably seen the cover. It is very strange. For over a year I would see it and be intrigued, but never intrigued enough to look any further into it. Until last week, I couldn’t have told you what style of game it even was. It wasn’t until I saw some tweets from Daniel Bloodworth that I finally gave this more than a passing glance. He referred to it as “Nuncharted,” which is very funny, and it was enough to get me to Google. And after doing a bit of research I… was still confused. I saw what looked like a dark, prestige horror game in some screenshots, and what looked like a pixel graphic indie game in others.
So what is Indika? Indika is a dark examination of guilt and faith and shame. It uses the medium of video games to present a question: How much good is good enough for God? Okay, but that’s just the artsy fartsy explanation. In practical terms, Indika is a surrealist puzzle adventure narrative experience interspersed with pixel-art sequences based on classic videogames. Actually, it presents itself overall as significantly more “video game-y” than most games like this would dare.
Indika is a nun in some alternate-reality version of mid-20th century Russia. She’s young, she can’t have been part of the order for long, but every single one of her fellow nuns absolutely hates her guts. It’s not entirely clear why that is, but what is clear is that every extraordinary effort she makes to gain their affection does absolutely nothing. The story begins with a pixelly Indika tumbling through a dark void, collecting icons that increase her points. We have absolutely no context about what points are or why we need them. Then she’s snapped back to reality – reality here meaning created in Unreal 4. Turns out she’s ruined some ceremony or other. We get the sense this happens somewhat frequently.
Indika wants to do good. She wants to be accepted by her peers in the Church, but more than anything she wants to be accepted by God. We learn a little more about her from the narrator, a snarky weirdo who seems to have it out for her. It doesn’t take long to figure out our narrator is actually the devil.
How can a nun of the church be expected to do a good job with the devil constantly yapping in her ear? It’s a good question. Indika just tries to ignore him. Most of the time, she’s successful, but from time to time he makes a comment that gets under her skin, that puts her on the defensive, and that situation can have reality-warping consequences. More on that later, though.
This is a short experience, maybe 3 to 4 hours depending on how often you get stuck on the puzzles, so I don’t want to say too much explicitly about the story. The story is the reason to experience this game, but the WAY you experience it is a fundamental part of that. The graphical presentation of this game suggests prestige – aside from the 8-bit sequences that we get a few times throughout the narrative, for the most part this is a dark and beautiful cinematic experience. The joke that this game is “Nuncharted” is a bit overblown, sure – there aren’t endless action sequences, and you’re not dangling out of an airplane at any point, but it does still have that sort of prestige adventure game aesthetic to it. But the font that alternates between giving us instructions on what to do next and showing ironically relevant verses from the Bible would look right at home in an NES game. As Indika carries out her responsibilities as a nun, she is awarded points, and at a certain point, she levels up. You can choose which direction you want her to develop on a simple skill tree.
But none of that matters. That’s not really a spoiler, because the game straight up tells you. The points don’t matter. Wanna get as many as you can? Go for it, search in every environment for holy icons to collect or for altars for Indika to pray at. You’ll get points, you’ll level up again. But it doesn’t matter. And that’s the point. The point of the points is there is no point.
The way the story is gamified trains a spotlight on Indika herself and the way she views her life in the convent. Delivering a basket of potatoes to an elderly nun? That’s worth fifty points, sure. Going through the repetitive task of filling a water barrel a bit at a time by traveling back and forth to a well? That’s gotta be a hundred points, absolutely. She wants to level up her piety, and given the voice that’s constantly whispering in her ear, you can sort of imagine why. She wants to be free of that, to live a guilt-free life with God.
Right away, though, there’s a stark contrast between the obvious gamification of what Indika does and the actual tasks you’re asked to complete. That aforementioned task of getting water from the well? It is GRUELING, and it is maybe the third task you have to perform in the game. If this game somehow landed in the hands of someone who… how should I put this without being insulting? Let me just say, if it landed in the hands of someone who wouldn’t find this type of experience meaningful? They would put the controller down, right here. Five minutes into the game. And depending on why you play video games, I might not blame you.
There is a prevailingly popular thought that video games are meant to be fun, that fun is the primary, if not the ONLY, emotion they’re meant to draw out of us. If we’re not enjoying every moment of a game experience, then why are we bothering? I feel like this sentiment is mostly due to video games still being a fairly young artform – after all, we don’t expect to have nothing but fun watching a movie, or reading a book. Those artforms are free to draw out all sorts of different emotions from us. So that, coupled with the fact that we call them “games,” and we’ve associated playing games with having fun since childhood. You don’t play basketball to get in touch with your feelings. You don’t play Crazy Eights to process personal traumas. You don’t play Monopoly to understand the true and fiery meaning of rage… Well, wait, actually, that one might be true. But by and large, games have always been about fun.
And there are a few parts of Indika that I would describe as “fun,” in that traditional sense. Some of the puzzles you’ll solve within the environments are “fun” in that way. The 2D pixel sequences that typically present Indika’s childhood memories, all based on traditional gameplay styles like 2D platformers and even Pac-Man. Those are fun in that old-school way, too. But the game doesn’t give you that right away. Instead, it asks you to fetch a bunch of water, to take several real-time minutes of your life performing a task that ultimately ends up being for nothing. That is not “fun” by anyone’s definition. But it’s also not supposed to be. This sequence is actually brilliant for pulling off what it sets out to do, which is to put us in Indika’s shoes. It’s one thing to be told the other nuns hate Indika, and another thing to be shown it. But it’s different entirely to experience it FOR OURSELVES. We’re given her drudgery and asked to endure it. If you tap out right there and put the game away, hey, that’s a valid response to being asked to do that sort of thing. But if you stick with it, you’ve formed a bond with Indika. You have something in common with her. Like Indika hoping to gain piety points, you’re willing to put up with wretched nonsense in the hope of receiving some kind of reward.
The game does a brilliant job of helping people who aren’t going to be interested in its particular type of reward into self-selecting out of the process. It goes even a step further than just the early gameplay by waving its freak flag from the very beginning. I called this game surrealist earlier, and I mean that really literally. This is a world that does not seem to make sense at all sometimes. Absolutely insane things happen, things that make you question Indika’s sanity, and again, that’s the point. She’s seeing crazy visions, she’s constantly hearing the voice of the devil. If you knew someone experiencing those things, you would assume they are in need of professional help, right? Well, Indika isn’t getting that from her peers. Who she WANTS it from, though, is God.
This is where I feel compelled to tread lightly. Anytime religion comes up in a game or movie or show or book, especially when religion is portrayed in a less-than-flattering light, I know it causes some people a lot of distress. That’s not my intention in talking about this game. But despite a lot of people finding negative portrayals of religion upsetting, I know there are many, myself included, who find that sort of thing extremely healing. Seeing a piece of art that validates your experience.
I was religious from about the age of 10 until my mid-thirties. I wasn’t just a church-goer, I was a worship leader and president of my church council. My wife and I volunteered weekly to ensure church services ran without a hitch. We were deeply, deeply involved. I don’t say that to toot my own horn – if anything, I’m sort of dragging myself a little, because all that effort didn’t amount to much. My point is, though, that religion was a very big part of my life. When I finally left it, it wasn’t because of one major thing alone. It was a bunch of things, a thousand tiny cuts that I was able to ignore until I couldn’t. Losing faith is such a hard thing to go through. Some people that are still within religion will point at people like me and say, oh, you just left because you wanted to sin and not feel bad about it. Which is so far from the actual truth. I and people like me generally leave because we find life within the faith to be worse than life outside of it. For some of us, it becomes a sort of moral imperative to leave. When you’re taught your entire life a series of tenets about how to be in the world, how to love people who are different from yourself, how to love and accept outsiders, and then that same community who taught you those tenets does a complete 180 on all that, you have a choice to make. Either you spin with them, or you keep going in the direction you were already heading. And for me, the latter was what I had to do.
Anyway, sorry for the aside about my religious history. I just think it’s illustrative to talk about my experience with the subject matter of Indika before I tell you why it resonated with me. Indika is sent on an errand, something pretty simple, to deliver a letter to another church. Along the way, she meets an escaped convict who is suffering from gangrene, his arm is probably hours from falling off. But he’s not just some convict with no morals – he’s a changed man. He’s a believer now, and he’s on his way to the Cathedral of John of Damascus because he’s heard the church has uncovered a relic there that can heal anyone of anything. This puts Indika in a tricky position. She could look past what this man has done and help him on his way, or she could ignore him and continue on with her church-appointed task. Her elders in the church would tell her of course, carry out your mission. Don’t associate with someone like that. But she feels a deeper calling to help him. But all the while, of course, she has the devil whispering to her, making her second guess herself. Is she really going because she wants to help him? Or does she just want to see evidence of a miracle for herself, so that she doesn’t feel like she’s wasted all this effort on a God that might not even exist?
What happens along the way and in the end is obviously spoiler territory, so we’re not going there. But I can say I was satisfied with the outcome, and I say that while knowing full well that many people are likely to disagree with me. It has an ending that kind of comes up out of nowhere, credits that start rolling and leave you feeling like… wait. That was it? That’s the end? That sort of rug pull can often end in frustration for me, but with Indika, I understood it. And it was the exact sort of reward I had hoped to get for seeing it through to the end.
I mentioned solving puzzles, and that’s the majority of what you’ll be doing. And “puzzles” in this case really just means figuring out how to get from point A to point B. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a particular item you need to unblock a path, but other times it involves some of that reality warping I mentioned before.
Most of the time, Indika ignores the devil’s running monologue. But at certain points, he really gets to her, and she pushes back. When that happens, the world breaks open. What this indicates, from a gameplay perspective, is that you are now in a traversal puzzle, and the only way to move forward is to use both the power of the devil and the power of prayer to work your way through. See, while the devil is yapping, the world stays broken apart. But when Indika prays, she can’t hear the devil anymore, and the world forms back together. Switching between praying and listening to the devil is how you make your way through, letting you get to places you otherwise couldn’t reach. It’s a pretty innovative mechanic, so it’s a shame you only get to do it a very small handful of times.
Other than that, the puzzles in Indika are relatively straightforward. I did find myself stuck for a few minutes now and then, mostly because I didn’t feel like the goals for a given location were signposted properly. You might like that, and I understand the desire to avoid the whole “yellow paint syndrome” of game design. But I think it’s a spectrum, and at times Indika errs too far on the side of not helping the player. Having said that, I never did get STUCK stuck, I always managed to figure it out, so I guess that’s worth something, right?
Indika is a haunting and beautiful experience, at least for me. I think by now you have an idea whether or not you’re in my camp. In a world where so many games try to reach the lowest common denominator, it’s refreshing to find a game that is so willing to drive so many away for the chance to tell its story the way it wants to.