Game EXP: INDIKA (VSD) [Part 1]

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for INDIKA through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

INDIKA

Release Date: May 2, 2024

Systems: Windows, Linux, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5

Publisher: 11 bit Studios

Developer: Odd Meter

Time Spent: 6.1 Hours

I have decided to split my article examining INDIKA into two articles, with today's focusing on the game and its mechanics and Friday's article covering the religious side of the game.  I had originally thought to have a fully integrated article, but the more I wrote and thought about it, the more I found myself putting off the topic of religion until I just got the to point where I had two articles.  Several game mechanics fully integrate with the topic of religion and I will cover those on Friday as well.

INDIKA is a story that follows a young nun in a fictionalized 19th-century Russia. She is sent to deliver a letter with contents unknown although of likely troubling substance and has a run-in with an escaped convict on his own spiritual journey of repentance and absolution.  The game is played predominantly in a third-person over-the-shoulder part adventure angle, part walking-sim, part psychological-horror, part puzzler, and light platformer.  There are times when Indika can die either from enemies, from not paying attention to your surroundings and falling off a wall, to being mauled by an emaciated dog, to being knocked off a carousel of drying fish.  About 1/3 of the way through the game, Indika meets an escaped convict, Ilya who she then travels with to a city to visit a holy relic to "heal" his gangrenous arm.

One of the seemingly out-of-left-field choices that INDIKA makes is how the game starts off when you take control of a younger version of Indika tumbling through space with shiny golden bobbles to collect as she falls.  The video game player in us all will immediately recognize what is happening and you will tilt Indika towards the glittering collectibles.  What makes this and later sequences unique is that it is presented in a 2D 16-bit visual style and each time the genre changes in a way that makes sense as a story-telling mechanic.  This aesthetic subsequently crops up every time Indika has a flashback or relates past events to Ilya about a Romani boy she knew, Mirko.  In one instance it plays as an isometric racer akin to RC Pro-Am or Super Off Road.  In another, it is a side-scrolling vertical platformer and in another, it is something similar to Pac-Man.  Because this story takes place in an alternate and fictionalized 19th-century Russia, it never felt that nostalgia for these graphics and gameplay were supposed to be from Indika's past, but for the player's benefit and I genuinely enjoyed the drastic change in gameplay modes from a gorgeous system intensive 3rd-person adventure game to a pixelated 2D platformer.

As previously mentioned, the majority of the game is played as a third-person adventure and light-survival horror elements(we'll get to the puzzle aspect next).  The controls here are all very intuitive if you're at all familiar with any game that has used an over-the-shoulder camera angle in the last 20 years, and thankfully here you can invert the y-axis for the camera controls; which you weren't able to in the demo.  Indika traverses areas by walking and only after the opening stage does running become a function; likely because it would be undignified for a nun to be running around a convent.  There is no jumping mechanic but Indika can climb certain objects if they are at about chest height and can drag/carry certain objects to be used to access specific areas.  There is no life meter, but if she falls from a height that is too great, she will die, although there are not a lot of instances where she can fall and die; there were a couple of cases in which I purposefully killed Indika to either reset a puzzle or to try and fix a potential bug, and a couple where the game wouldn't let me walk off a ledge.

Puzzles are a mixed bag in INDIKA, and I mean that there are different types of puzzles used throughout the game.  None of the puzzles are reused in a way that makes the player feel, "Oh, I've done this already, I guess I'll just do it again for the 10th time."  In the opposite direction though, I wish there had been more instances where you used one of the more unique puzzle mechanics.  In only two cases, a voice that Indika occasionally hears becomes violent and aggressive which causes distortions in the the world, but when Indika prays (by actively pressing and holding the L2 Trigger button on the Steam Deck) the world returns to normal.  I am 99% sure that you have to use these distortions caused by the voice Indika hears to cross through the areas, but there is an achievement for solving one of these puzzles while constantly praying, so I must be wrong.  I really liked how these particular puzzles were integrated into the storytelling and did have a bit of character development if you listened to what the voice was saying as things that Indika observed about the other nuns in the convent.  The only negative thing I have to say is that because I tended to take longer to solve the puzzles, the voice ended up repeating the same dialogue a couple of times, but that's on me.

Several other one-off puzzles occurred in the game, one of which I think could have used some additional QA testing, or I am just not as sharp as I should be while playing after 12:30 AM.  These puzzles vary from balancing on a plank, elevator switching, stacking large cans to create steps, and stacking bridges; I won't say more about the bridges and just leave it up to your imagination.  The can-stacking puzzle gave me the greatest trouble for three reasons.  First, was that the controls for the forklift-type vehicle felt awkward as this device had four wheels that could rotate to change the direction you were facing.  Second was that it was very easy to do the puzzle wrong in a way that would cause you to spend a significant amount of time to get back to where you needed to be to solve the puzzle.  I know it would have been immersion-breaking, but I wish there had been a "reset" option to start the puzzle over from the beginning.

Throughout the entire game, I only looked up a walkthrough once, but that was because I was experiencing a bug that I wasn't 100% sure about.  Towards the end of the game, you are following your companion Ilya and at times he will wait for you so he isn't so far ahead that you lose complete track of him.  Because this was my first time playing, I was off wandering around, looking for collectibles in out-of-the-way areas and looking for the elusive "seat" where you can just sit and scroll/click through a series of camera angles showing different perspectives of the area you're in.  I think what happened was that at the time I activated one of these chairs/benches, Ilya entered a spot where Indika is supposed to "trigger" him to activate a switch (by pressing the Y button on the Steam Deck).  Something happened in the background of the game that made pressing the Y button essentially functionless.  Only after watching a walkthrough did I see what was supposed to have happened.  My fix was to restart and play through where Ilya could be activated, make sure it worked, and then go back to the chair.  All of this is to say that the game doesn't require outside sources to solve puzzles and that the puzzles (for the most part) and progress are well constructed.

One mechanic that I loved was the scattered benches, one in almost every chapter, where you could sit and take a moment.  When I first came upon a bench in the convent in the first chapter and saw the option to "Sit," I passed it up thinking that this was going to be similar to every other game where your character sits and then you can rotate the camera around them, but this is not the case in INDIKA.  Instead, while Indika sits, the camera moves to different static locations throughout the area for the chapter you're currently playing.  The camera takes different angles to show the area in cinematic shots that you wouldn't be able to reach or achieve through regularly playing the game.  And the world is still moving and "living" during these shots, with your companion Ilya futzing with a wagon, or wind and snow blowing through pine trees.  I wasn't able to determine if there was a more significant meaning behind the shots and the locations, but I just simply took it as a moment to rest and take in the story up until that point.  I put together a compilation video of most of the shots throughout the game last week to help illustrate the world of INDIKA.

There is plenty that we have not discussed in INDIKA in terms of gameplay, environmental storytelling, and puzzles, but those aspects are tied to the game's themes and messages on religion.  We did hint a little bit on that in regards to the area distorting/praying puzzles, but we will revisit those as well as the overarching topic of religion in Friday's article.  Trying to fit that nicely into everything else felt odd and a bit shoehorned.  We will also discuss (a bit) the ending of the game and what that point/counter is in the upper left corner of the screen.  The takeaway from today is that INDIKA is a gorgeously developed and directed game with an emphasis on telling a compelling character-driven story while still making this a traditional modern video game.  There is an eye for cinematography not often seen in indie games that I appreciated in both the actual gameplay and the cinematics.

INDIKA is a fun game, but also a great experience in video game narrative storytelling, one that I will hopefully be able to successfully expand upon come Friday.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And Darkness Shall Rise Up to Heaven