Indika (PS5)

Faith and works can be a difficult concept to contend with in Christianity if you’re allowed to ruminate on it. Scripture does not lay out some quantifiable way to measure your favor with God or any way to gauge the certainty of your place in heaven, so how much does an individual act impact your hopes of eternal bliss? How much does piety counterbalance impropriety, especially in a system where forgiveness is possible? There’s suggestions of course that certain actions hold more weight than others, but even a celibate life in a convent can’t be guaranteed to bring you closer to heaven because there is no provable feedback saying your actions are greater than that of a sinner. Indika is a game of many such theological conundrums, and it uses its nature as a video game to interesting effect to get the player pondering similar ideas but in terms of their gameplay experience.

Indika is the name of a young Russian nun who is living a difficult life in a convent. Despised by her sisters while grappling with her own faith, Indika is sent away to deliver a letter that puts her in contact with others she can interact with more freely. However, while she is often troubled by her thoughts and desires, there is a far greater temptation at play, a voice constantly speaking in the back of her mind that urges her to give into base impulses and desires. Be it psychosis or demon, Indika’s already fragile faith is constant battered by this voice that always seeks to undermine her efforts to be pious. However, more grounded temptations exist as well, Indika encountering a soldier named Ilya who’s arm is injured beyond hope, but he believes the sacred artifact the Kudets may miraculous heal him. While the Kudets may help to affirm her faith should it do such a thing, she also finds a speaking partner who she is drawn to, both physically and as someone who can maybe understand the crisis she’s experiencing with her Christian beliefs.

Indika almost works as a pure narrative adventure, the players actions often meant more for advancing a very focused plot. The environments you walk through can be quite gorgeously realized despite their snow-covered and industrial looks, and detailed character close-ups allow for more impactful subtle moments. Indika is also not afraid to get very dark or explore the rough side of sexual subject matter, and it could have very well told an effective immersive tale focused on the story alone. However, no matter the moment, up in the top left corner of the screen, you’ll see your score. During Indika’s sometimes harrowing journey, you can earn points in a deliberately disruptive break from the often grounded realistic world you’re viewing, but the intrusion of video game elements is clearly intentional and part of the broader messages about the insubstantial nature of religious faith.

When you find a relic, light a candle, or do some devout work at the convent, you’ll earn points represented by little pixelated coins. These are your reward for being a pious and proper nun, but the game soon tells you these points serve no purpose. Perhaps you’ll take the tip at face value at first, but then as you continue along, it’s hard not to doubt that claim. There are collectibles to find that provide the points, so maybe there’s at least a PlayStation trophy for reaching a certain amount. You can sometimes lose these points, so perhaps they have value because you can’t be sure what would happen if you ran out. Maybe there’s even just a final score given at the end. It’s hard to fight against the way video games have conditioned us to think a score at least has some point or purpose, and that ingrained response to seeing a number go up works here even thought you’ve been told it’s meaningless. At the same time, you have that voice whispering to you to deceive you, and an unusual artistic direction was taken with the representation of animals in Indika’s world. Most every animal is larger than life, with a goat towering tall like an elephant and the fish at a canning plant filling containers large enough to hold a human. You don’t know how often to trust your eyes or understanding, and that feels like it ties back to Indika’s ongoing crisis of faith.

You, the player, don’t know the value of these points. You will sometimes be told they have none and then see something that suggests they do. In Indika’s case, she does what she believes will help her soul find God’s light, but she is similarly grasping at some indicator it has some point or value. This is particularly potent in an early portion where she is told to fetch pails of water at the convent, the action dull and slow but you get told this is valuable work by the points you earn even when it feels so shallow. How can fetching these pails of water truly impact her chance at reaching heaven or understanding God? She’s been told they will, but it’s hard to say the feedback for doing it holds any true weight. Can we really say doing right will effect something we cannot perceive? There’s no way to know a chaste life may have lead to some miracle when those with and without religion can experience similar things. These points end up an important part of putting you into Indika’s headspace, the medium used to clever effect to root the story whether you share similar beliefs to her or have different views entirely.

Indika does throw in some other video game elements as part of its story-telling, such as Indika’s past being represented by pixel art, but it doesn’t always hold the same weight as the point system. Indika includes many moments that are almost like minigames or puzzles as well, these often not quite that difficult nor seeming to hold the same narrative weight. It gives you something more direct to do, such as weaving through machinery, racing on a bike, or using the game’s mild steampunk leaning for some larger than life tasks like moving pieces of architecture. We may be again in the realm of the warped perception Indika has, the player also left to speculate if things are distorted because of her mental struggles or if that masculine voice that always tries to drive her towards the negative is truly a demon pushing her away from Christianity. There are a few moments that feel like they had some room to grow gameplay wise, such as moments where her faith is truly at the point of shattering and you need to ground her through prayer. If you let the dark thoughts run rampant, the world breaks apart, your prayers pulling it back together, this used to navigate areas as some places can only be reached thanks to how they are moved between the two views of the world. It’s not an idea used often despite it nicely having one foot in a deeper story meaning while the other provides you a puzzle to solve, but Indika is still mostly concerned with its narrative despite using video game trappings to strengthen themes.

THE VERDICT: Indika is able to tell a serious tale about its leading lady’s crisis of faith and difficult life, but by injecting video game elements into that plot, it is able to elevate some of its themes to the forefront for closer consideration. Rather than examining only her struggles with how her beliefs can be tested, the player gets to have their own part in the theological considerations thanks to ideas like the omnipresent point system. The gameplay isn’t always the imaginative even when there’s puzzle solving, but it helps this narrative adventure hold more weight as you are essentially asked what you believe about your time with a video game tracking your score while Indika ponders the heavier subjects in a plot that would have worked well without the extra layer but ends up more fascinating for the presence of the deliberately out-of-place game components.

And so, I give Indika for PlayStation 5…

A GOOD rating. While sometimes labelled a horror game because of its occasionally dark and distorted sights, Indika is not really one, its story often reserved and careful with there being no real scares along the way. You could say though there is some fear to be found in the deeper questions being pondered, as Indika herself is pulled in various directions with no clear answers possible to grasp. The game wants you to do a lot of interpretation while still moving through events that have clearer surface level value, characters even outwardly discussing their thoughts on religion at times, but Indika also uses its video game concepts to play with your own understanding of things. If you see a screen filled with little coins to collect, it’s hard to resist grabbing them all, even if you were told you don’t need to. Something in your mind tells you they do hold value, but even more, the narrative purpose of them can extend even further. When the game is done, what purpose did your score hold? Do those PlayStation trophies really matter, regardless of how they’re earned? You can argue there was value in the actions taken beyond the way they’re tracked, but that pulls you back to the question of Indika’s works as a nun. Fetching water of course has a clear base value, water is moved from one place to another, but the extra elements claiming it is more important is how it ties back to the theological consideration of the purpose of any act of devotion. Denying base desires feels pious, but there’s no confirmation it is earning you greater consideration, or that it really is necessary compared to other possible actions. Indika is a game for ruminating and discussing such matters, on focusing in on how Indika and Ilya both consider it in different ways based on their life circumstances and what they’ve learned both in regular life and in moments of worship. The story is the draw, but the gameplay elements that give you work to do both in terms of simple navigation or actual puzzle solving do feel like they could have been pushed further. There are moments where you work your brain a bit and get the satisfaction of puzzling things out, but if the game could have leaned more into a narrative relationship with such tasks like those moments of fractured reality more often, Indika might have become an even more robust and impressive video game narrative.

Indika is no horror game but it may scare off players with its heavy subject matter at times or its reliance on discussions of religion. However, it feels like an atheist and a Christian can both walk away with valid interpretations that fit within their beliefs, the game providing concrete moments but also leaving room for interpretation down different paths. Faith relies on the intangible and sometimes feels at odd with reason, but Indika’s tragic struggles with it raise questions anyone can consider and they can walk away with their own ideas on what she should have done or how her beliefs should adjust after her tribulations. Indika is character focused while also having themes that end up applicable to the player as well thanks to the way the video game weaves into story, this narrative adventure providing some thought-provoking moments if you approach it with a bit of trust and faith.