Developed/Published by: Odd Meter / 11 Bit Studios
Released: 2/5/2024
Completed: 20/01/2025
Completion: Finished it.

Alright so we’re on our third game in a row with a female protagonist whose name begins with “I” but at least it’s not Iris, and she’s not a motorbike. I call that progress.

A bit like with 1000xRESIST, however, it’s rather hard to explain Indika without giving the entire game away, and this is a game that the less you know about it going in the more it will surprise and delight you. So to cut to the chase: I really think you should play Indika. If you haven’t yet, it’ll take less than four hours, and you could probably play it on the big telly with a loved one if you like to do things like that (and if you think they’re up to the game’s heavy themes.) So you can do that and come back here whenever you like.

…

Alright, just us who’ve already played the game then?

Indika hooked me, I’d say, when, while performing the game’s first “mission” of pointlessly schlepping water from a well to a barrel, Indika’s internal monologue/the devil says:

“The sisters *loved* Indika. Christian love is known to be patient, merciful and faithful. However, in a lowly, human sense, they didn’t love her that much.

…To be completely honest, they didn’t love her at all.”

It is a beautiful piece of writing that immediately lets you know everything about Indika’s situation; and it is performed with incredible relish by actor Silas Carson, who (improbably) played both “one of the racist trade federation aliens” and “the conehead Jedi” in the Star Wars prequels.

Although if I’d been thinking, I’d have played this through in Russian, the English dub is so insanely good I’m not completely certain that it isn’t primary–or at least, it’s valid in the way that if you’re watching a Spaghetti Western it can often not be any more “correct” to watch it in Italian based on how they were made. Carson gives a performance that puts me in mind of Malcolm McDowell at his most demonic, and Isabella Inchbald might be even better with a performance that isn’t so much restrained as laden with the restraint that Indika performs.

If Indika was just the narrative, just the story of a woman trapped by context, I think I’d still love it. But what blows me away about Indika is that the game investigates and critiques its own video game form as it goes. In a strange way, Indika couldn’t exist as it does without the big-budget high-fidelity third-person action games it critiques, but via its critique it shows that, if you take an actual moral position, if you actually try and tell a story, if you [gulp] try and create art… the form is just as valid???

I won’t pretend that this aspect of Indika isn’t often a bit blatant. I do not, completely, love the use of pixel art and older video game tropes. I’ve seen people riff that Indika is “Nuncharted” but I really want to impress upon you that the “joke” is not that you’re playing a nun in an Unreal Engine game that looks insane. The commentary is, well, I think it’s dual. On one very simple level, it’s that you can make a high-fidelity third-person game where your main character doesn’t have to shoot anyone. On a deeper level, it’s that everything these games make you do is absolutely fucking pointless, and it intentionally tries to disillusion you with it to make your experience resonate with Indika’s!!!

I truly believe this is brilliant. Sure, as I noted above, the use of some tropes is perhaps to blatant–the levelling system might lead to the game’s greatest gotcha, but it’s weirdly neutered by the game telling you what it’s doing too early (or at all, actually.) But I don’t think there’s any mistake in that one of the things you do in this game is move ladders about literally exactly the same way you do in The Last of Us, which in context is so, so funny. Taking perhaps the most ridiculous example of “interactivity” from a series with absolutely the most bloated sense of self-importance to make you question the value of it all. I adored it.

To be completely fair, I can understand if you were to bounce of Indika because it is, ultimately, using this to give an unyielding, strident opinion of religion–there’s really no wiggle room on it (if you bounce off of it because it’s taking the piss out of video games, I’ll leave it at “oh dear.”) But I love that this game has an unashamed point of view and I love how it takes you there.

Will I ever play it again? I’d actually rather like to play this again, one day, on an absolutely psychopathically high spec system. Maybe some decades later…

Final Thought: This isn’t really an essay for people who haven’t played Indika, but I do feel that if you’ve read this far and haven’t played it, and got excited to, I should mention again that the game intentionally deals with some legitimately heavy themes that I think some people might find genuinely distressing–I suggest you look up content warnings if you aren’t comfortable going into things blind.