Developer Odd Meter Publisher 11 Bit Studios Format PC Release Out now
The young nun trudges up the wet dirt path that carves the snow in two, steel pail in hand. Arriving at the well, she places it down, grabbing the chain attached to the well’s own bucket before turning the handle to lower it into the water. When it reaches the bottom, she winds the handle in the opposite direction to winch it back up, before pouring its contents into her own receptacle, retracing her steps back to a barrel into which she must deposit the water. Against this starkly convincing backdrop, a pop-up displayed in bright orange pixels appears – making it clear that this is the first of five identical back-and-forth trips that Indika, under our guidance, will be forced to make. We’re understandably put out, but not as much as we are by our reward, as an older sister emerges from a nearby door and promptly undoes the past ten minutes of toil.
Indika, needless to say, is not in a good place – literally and figuratively – and Odd Meter’s eccentric narrative adventure wants to give you some sense of how that feels. This is not even your first chore, having already ferried a basket of potatoes from the warehouse to the refectory. Such drudgery gives you a flavour of Indika’s daily grind, but its incongruous UI, with its glowing rewards and pixellated upgrade paths, seems to be simultaneously satirising the shallow gamification of menial tasks. It draws a line, too, between the meta-rewards games offer and the idea that completing virtuous deeds might bring one closer to God.
But perhaps not Indika, who has been shunned by her sisters as a sinner, for reasons that will later become apparent. And though she might be seeking forgiveness for some past misdeed, it appears she’s closer to the other place than heaven: her inner monologue is punctuated by the voice of a demon, chipping away at her fragile sense of self-worth and pushing her toward immoral actions. And this is when she’s in her comfort zone. When events result in her leaving the monastery to deliver a letter, she’s an even more pitiful figure, clutching her rosary so tightly the beads draw blood.
Given all this, it might surprise you to learn that Indika leavens its misery with darkly comic touches. Several of its most horrifying moments are delivered with curious flourishes, from off-kilter camera angles to contrapuntal soundtrack choices. With bursts of pulsing electronica and chiptune inflections, it’s as deliberately jarring as Damon Albarn’s score for cannibal thriller Ravenous – and while Indika doesn’t lurch into full-bore horror, that film’s seesawing tone is a useful point of comparison. You can never be entirely sure how deliberate its peculiarities are: some of the cuts between playable and non-interactive sequences are so sudden that it’s hard not to suspect technical shortcomings. At least until the fifth or sixth tim
