INDIKA Review

Most of Indika is set in the Russian countryside, in the early winter of the twentieth century. But just how set is it? For one thing, some of the architecture appears to have swelled beyond reason, and as for the motorised bicycle that we find, with a trailer of carved wood and a coughing chimney, it’s as if we were being peddled a distorted vision of the past. Our heroine, Indika, is a nun, ordered to deliver a letter to a nearby monastery. The landscape is a muted white, like old bedsheets, and the roads are lined with frozen slurry. She is harried by strange visions and voices – or, more accurately, one voice: urbane and inquisitive, with a streak of mocking cruelty, it pours into her mind and picks at her beliefs. You worry about her faith as much as you do her footing. Both seem liable to crack and melt.

You instinctively root for her, in part because she looks so lost, but also because nuns have gotten a bad rap in games, usually relegated to the status of horror cliché. My abiding memory of Hitman: Absolution is of a specialist team of nun assassins, swathed in latex and toting assault rifles. Thus, it comes as a blessed relief to see that Indika isn’t packing a Makarov under her wimple, or a pair of thigh-high boots; just a simple rosary, wound over her knuckles, and a nervous frown. She is the real deal. The most action-packed moment of the adventure consists of her running from a wild dog. In fairness, the creature does resemble something from Bloodborne, a graphite scribble with extra foam, but it doesn’t truly represent the rest of the game, which is made up of third-person environmental puzzles – winches, pulleys, cranes – and large portions of walk-and-talk.

She soon meets Ilya, an escaped convict who says that he has heard the voice of God. He is after an artefact, the Kudets, housed in a cathedral and reputed to heal body and soul. For Ilya, the body will be plenty. Not only does he sport a broken nose and bruised eyes; his left arm is shrivelled and black, claimed by gangrene, and rather than amputate Ilya wants to claw it back, if possible, with Holy power. Until then, an injection from Indika’s medical bag will have to suffice. Not long after, he complains, the Divine Word falls quiet.

At the crux of Indika is a carefully composed clash: not the stark and easy battle of good versus evil but, instead, the thornier entanglement of reason versus faith. Has God really stopped talking to Ilya, or has the shot (either an antibiotic or merely morphine) coursed through him and cooled his fevered imagination? Much the more interesting question is, How do we feel about the change? Have rationality and science pricked and numbed our capacity for the numinous, and thus our chance for spiritual peace, or have they sprung us from a psychic jail – a set of beliefs that wrap us like bars and choke our health? The game’s writer, Dmitry Svetlov, has described the Russian Orthodox church as “a weapon of propaganda,” and the game makes a trenchant case for the silly nastiness of Christian doctrine, but the pilgrimage here is spurred on by spiritual hunger and haunted by the noise of progress.

Look at the sequence where our two searchers make their way through the pungent innards of a fish cannery – a grim industrial parody of feeding the multitude. Great beasts of the sea drift by on conveyor belts, ferried through the gloom on hooks toward the distant glow of a furnace. The whole scene is a nightmare of the modern, nature meeting its mechanised end, churned and sealed into tubes. There’s no denying the horror of it, and the developer, Odd Meter, cranks up the surrealism until it reaches the level of early Lynch, who knew that the quickest way to stick in your mind was to turn your stomach. Logically, you understand that the clatter and bustle of industry is, by and large, a sign of economic fettle; but, as Ilya says, “If the soul didn’t exist, all that remains would be your logical shit.”

Far more peaceful are the earlier scenes, which have you fetching pails of water from a well. The only threat is boredom. The game steeps you in the monotony of convent life, and the camera is pitched behind Indika at shoulder level, as though we were the devil crooning into her ear. After the third or fourth bucket, we’re hungry for her to break the habit. This pattern of rhythm and lapse holds throughout. We get a fitful burst of first person later on, and there are several excursions into flashback, each rendered in rich pixel art. One segment, styled after Pac-Man, has you munching gold coins while a pursuer gives chase. When I first heard about this, I worried that Odd Meter was being wilfully weird – that the game, with its front cover of gurning crones and yolk-yellow lettering, was on a mission to stand out at all costs.

In the event, these diversions prove worthwhile, because they snap you into a past more purposeful and arcade-bright than the present, and because they leave a trace. As Indika and Ilya shuffle over cold terrain, she finds chances to practice her rites – to light candles, cross herself, and so on – with a floating gold coin as a reward. It comes across, at first, like an arch joke; these points feed into a faith upgrade tree, but we are told that the system has no effect. Odd Meter speaks video game as fluently as it does scripture; the loading screens give us gospel quotations, but it’s these little gamelets that invest Indika’s quest with a quiet meaning. Each gold coin feels like a caution: beware the danger of going hungrily through the motions. And there are few as qualified as Pac-Man to issue a warning on the fruitlessness of chasing ghosts.

Not that Indika is without overreach. Some of its sights could have been plucked from the more desperate quarters of a Ken Russell movie. Personally, I would have done without the closeup of a nun’s face, as she whistles Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” for a good thirty seconds. Beyond basic creepiness, what does it show or tell? Likewise, the score, cloudy with synth and charged with electronic chirrups, sometimes strays into pained idiosyncrasy. Elsewhere, however, this is a work of lean restraint. It runs just over the four-hour mark – about as long as its mechanics can take it – and the ending is both loaded with import and abruptly lopped off. When was the last time you pondered the significance of a game’s conclusion days afterward? Whether it counts as a triumphant breaking of bondage or a hopeless end of the line is up to you. Not since the close of Robert Eggers’s The Witch have I taken such delicious pleasure in feeling so undecided. In both cases, grave implications hang fire in the face of personal epiphany. And in both cases you wonder what the future can possibly hold. Is there much chance for hope ahead? Say your prayers.