ATProto Browser

{
  "text": "Indika is both quietly contemplative and at times surreal and absurd, all in the service of commentary on both gaming and religion. Why do we do what our quests tell us to? Will we get the reward promised at the end?",
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        "alt": "The very first thing you ever do in Indika is fill up a well. As weird as it might sound, this sequence is one I must not spoil for you, as it’s a perfect encapsulation of what Indika is: a game that uses its own systems to question the very concept of game systems themselves. It belongs to a short but very important list of games that poke at things many game players take for granted. Dear Esther, the popularizer of the walking simulator, asked what amount of player interaction you needed to qualify as “gameplay”, and The Stanley Parable looked at the tension between player agency and the rails and boundaries set up by the developer. Indika asks us to consider why we do things in games: is it simply because the game tells us to? Because we’re given large text on the screen that says what our Quest is? Because we’re promised a reward at the end? And it asks us to think through those systems by drawing parallels between itself and a different game, one that many of us have experience with: religion.",
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        "alt": "Indika is a young nun at a Russian convent in the late 19th century. She struggles with fitting in as the other nuns openly scorn her, and you figure it must have something to do with the fact that she hears the voice of the devil in her head, and has regular hallucinations which keep disrupting everyday rituals and tasks. So when she is asked to leave the convent to deliver a letter to a cathedral a town over, she dutifully acquiesces, but at the same time she doesn't have the greatest confidence that successful completion of this task will be her saving grace. \nThe second most important character in Indika is the devil. He is the narrator of the game, but he exists diegetically, and his narration almost feels tongue-in-cheek, like he’s not talking to you, the player, he’s talking to Indika and poking fun at her. Mainly he voices Indika’s own doubts about her faith, her world, and her role in it. The situation is kind of like the stereotypical angel/devil on your shoulder except Indika does not have an angel. Is he a figment of Indika’s imagination though, or does he actually exist? Well, the game isn’t going to make it that easy for you.",
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        "alt": "Along your journey you’ll stumble through the snowy Russian countryside (If a game like Gone Home is playing with audience expectations around the horror of a dark empty house, this game does the same for snowy European villages) until you meet Ilya, a fugitive solider whose arm is infected, frostbitten, and barely qualifying as still attached. Ilya is a pseudo-love interest (though the sexual tension remains at a relatively tepid simmer throughout) but more importantly he is a foil to Indika in terms of how he conceives of religion. Not only is he devoted, but close to blindly so, with faith in absolute miracles beyond what we assume to be possible in this world.\nA lot of Indika’s best sequences are actually just dialogue between Indika and the devil, or Indika and Ilya as you wander through different environments. Their different views on why they’re doing what they’re doing and how they got there are the meat of the drama. Although there are a handful of more bombastic moments, the sequences that resonated with me the most were the quieter ones, where the conflict is simply one character posing their view on a topic, and another weighing in and raising questions, and neither one reaching a satisfying or explicit conclusion.",
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        "alt": "As much as I talk about how much of Indika’s commentary lives in its writing, an equal amount of it is McLuhan-istically conveyed in the details of the medium itself. Indika is a very video game-y video game. It looks like an Unreal engine showcase, the lighting is meticulous, environments are realistic enough that you leave tracks in the mud and snow, but it’s also littered with pixel art and 8-bit sound effects and big text that says ‘LEVEL UP!’. It’s a garish contrast that serves to underscore the feeling of contradiction that is raging within Indika and between the characters.\nIndika works best on someone who has literacy with both the videogame tropes it is commenting on as well as someone with some experience with systems of religion. It’s in drawing parallels between the two that its commentary is the most effective. The more you know about both the more interesting Indika is, I think mainly because it’s easy to read “religion is a video game” as a shallow and almost trite supposition, but Indika leaves a lot of space for interpretation and nuance, and gives just enough of an outline for you to color in with your own perspective. I kind of like that about it; there are a bunch of things that it leaves open for interpretation, and it’s tough to develop one unifying theory around what the truth of it is. Well. It’s a bit like religion in that way, isn’t it.",
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  "createdAt": "2025-03-16T14:25:27.690Z"
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