2024 has been a year of many big releases, and I’ve played quite a lot of them, which means plenty more games inevitably fall through the cracks. It’s rare that, during a busy release year, I get a chance to check out a game months after it came out, and it’s even more rare that I fall in love with it. But that’s exactly what happened when I got around to playing Indika, a third-person adventure game that was released back in May. Now, I can’t believe I waited so long to experience it. Indika is one of the most fascinating releases of the year, blending friction-filled gameplay with a narrative that dissects religious trauma.
The first major task players undertake in Indika is filling a large barrel full of water. In the 19th-century Russian convent where Indika—the titular protagonist—lives as one of many nuns, that job means walking back and forth between the barrel and a well with only a small bucket to get the task done. It takes you five trips to fill the barrel to the brim, at which point one of your superiors casually walks by and purposefully pushes it over, emptying the barrel of the fruit of your labor. You might ask yourself, “What was the point of filling the barrel then?” That’s the neat part! It was pointless, and it’s just the start of the frustrations you and Indika will have to deal with along this roughly five-hour journey.
Everyone at the convent Indika lives hates the young nun for seemingly no reason. She is a quiet and overly worrisome follower of faith plagued by a voice in her head she believes is the devil constantly punishing her for every perceived sinful thought and action she has. One day Indika is asked to deliver a letter to a distant church away from the convent. Is this an important task given to her or just another piece of meaningless busy work that the rest of the nuns expect Indika won’t return from? Well, that’s up to you to decide.
The journey requires Indika to navigate through progressively depressing locales in snow-covered Russia. She meets a handful of people along her path, all of whom act pretty shitty to her and the rest of the world. Sometimes you’ll encounter environmental puzzles that have you pushing crates and crawling through spaces. When the constant voice in Indika’s head gets overwhelming, her world will start shattering in ways that require you to press a button to pray away the twisted changes. It makes for some fascinating platforming puzzles during which you’ll intermittently pray to switch between the broken and normal versions of the world to get where you need to go.
One of the most interesting things Indika does is shift from the heavily realistic modern graphics the majority of the game uses to a retro 16-bit pixel style. These sections are flashbacks to Indika’s life before she became a nun and are wonderfully poignant moments of real emotional depth. You also collect points throughout the game that give you seemingly useless upgrades like “Shame” and “Guilt” which in turn only give you more points on a skill tree that seems to lead nowhere. Both of these artistic choices evoke the arcade era of gaming associated with racking up scores but not actually giving you a win-state, which mirrors the protagonist’s experience with the church.
Indika’s tour of pain and suffering in the shadow of religion isn’t subtle. It is pretty clear that the game sees the religious trauma Indika goes through as a meaningless result of the institution of religion’s failings. Its excellent execution, however, makes it an incredibly worthwhile experience. There is something endlessly compelling about stories dealing with the unique experience of femininity in relation to the institute of religion.
Playing Indika made me constantly think back on 2023’s Misericorde: Volume One, another fantastic narrative game focused on the complex emotions associated with religion acting as both a prison and an escape for women (please go play Misericorde). At the end of the day, Indika is just a broken woman searching for something to save her, and the institute of religion feeds on that vulnerability and only makes it worse. If you want to play something unlike anything else this year, you absolutely need to play Indika.
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