Indika Review

For a seemingly dour art game excoriating religion, is pretty funny. With its publishing duties handled by 11 bit studios, the small team at the now-Kazakhstan-based studio Odd Meter have devised a discomfiting surrealist dirge of an adventure game, one which matches exquisite moments and inventive visuals with jagged third-person exploration controls. Centered on a nun within the Russian Orthodox Church of the late 19th century, presents a bleak tale stuffed with black humor. Amid the developing political reality surrounding Russia in the present day, the quest feels poignant, even while much of its messaging relies on subjective interpretation.

Citing filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Darren Aronofsky as inspirations, ’s dark humor and existential dialogue come off as artfully cinematic in its best moments. It’s the type of project one would expect to be encumbered by budgetary constraints, and its very existence as a fully-3D high-res adventure contemporizes the effects of its story, granting it the whiff of a luxurious AAA experience. The spell is continuously broken, however; sometimes by a clumsy chase sequence or unexpected death, other times by a confrontational sensibility desperate to elicit a response.

Indika is as awkward as it is sublime.

stars a soft-spoken, insecure, traumatized young nun relegated to a convent in a wintry region of Russia in the late 1800s. The very beginning finds her performing menial chores and suffering casual mistreatment by her peers, who disrespect and ignore her in equal measure. It’s a disorienting introduction, andthe player’s reaction to being tasked with gradually fetching buckets of water from a well for no clear reward will probably dictate how receptive they’ll be to the game’s use of dark humor and tedium.

Like many other aspects of, these diversions appear deliberate and flagrantly game-like; there’s even an experience points system represented by pixelated numbers in the corner of the screen, connected to a