Indika review
Indika is a misfit Russian Orthodox nun on a mission. She's tasked with delivering a note to the Danilov monastery, which is a welcome reprieve, because the other nuns in her own monastery hate her guts. Little wonder, though: she's not a very good nun.
What is it? Third-person puzzle-centric adventuring starring a jilted Russian Orthodox nun
Expect to pay: TBC
Developer: Odd Meter
Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
Reviewed on: RTX 3060 (laptop), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Steam Deck: TBC
Link: Official site
The trip is fated to go spectacularly wrong, and that's no spoiler, because the tone of Indika immediately warns us that we've entered a redemption-free zone. Across the six hours it took me to complete, our doomed hero moves through a succession of bleak, dehumanising environments, solves a bunch of puzzles, survives some utterly miserable encounters, fails to achieve anything she set out to do, and then must go on living. It didn't make me feel good, but I loved it all the same.
Indika's evocation of late 19th century Russia is daubed with horror-inflected surrealism: The narrow slush-flooded lanes of the monastery are shaded by sagging cupolas, and outside the monastery's walls everything is bizarrely oversized, even the mangy dogs. The world is pockmarked with unexplainable chasms and knotty architecture. Ruin is ubiquitous, though we're never told why. Environments rarely logically cohere: a town is shadowed by a giant viaduct, which is itself shadowed by an immense monastery. For some reason, I'm usually traversing this expanse via parapet and scaffolding. The result is impressionistic, dreamlike and rotely «videogame-y» at the same time, not least because the soundtrack consists of ambient-leaning chiptune that sometimes ascends into strobing dance.
What kind of game is Indika? Remove its tonally kaleidoscopic habit and it's a narrative-driven third-person adventure with environmental puzzles. The puzzles aren't always brilliant or original, but they
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