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In God We Trust—Or Do We?
I don’t usually have the full information of a video game I’d like to play. I mostly just read or watch a gameplay video of the upcoming game and then decide do I like it or not. Sometimes I even stop the reveal trailer in the middle so I don’t get “too much spoiled”. That had happened to me, believe it or not, but sometimes trailers show too much.
Indika was a game that I immediately loved after seeing some clips of it. The gameplay looked weird and quirky, yet serious at the same time. Indika was first released on PC and it got good reviews. It took almost a couple weeks for the game finally seeing console release.
Not an ordinary nun
INDIKA tells a story of a monastery nun, Indika. After a few coincidences she leaves the monastery and goes to an adventure with a companion, Ilya, a man who escapes the war that is going on in this fictional piece of history in Russia. She also has a second companion; the devil himself, who likes to speak to her and question everything she knows.
The whole story in INDIKA was interesting. The game liked to question, not just religion, but everything about life. I liked the story and how it progressed from one theme to another. The plot was rather dark overall and the ending was nice, even though I think it ended quite abruptly.
Gameplay, controls, Audio and visuals
The gameplay in INDIKA was mostly third person story-driven walking simulator and do some puzzles here and there to progress to another area. But there was times when the game had some pixelated 2D platform sequences and one time even first person mode. Yes, it might seem odd, but INDIKA liked to question everything we know about video games and their styles. It liked to mash many genres together. The game also had some point system and “leveling up”. I use this term very loosely because as the game itself said at one point; the points doesn’t even matter. I honestly don’t know what the whole purpose of them was, in the end.
Controls were simple. End of story. There was nothing difficult about this game or its controls. As the main theme is third person story-driven adventure, everything was about the story and felt like the gameplay came second. It is easy to play, so nothing much to add to that.
I played this with headphones and the audio was OK. It had some issues at times when the audio was too loud suddenly or too low at some points. I did also play this without headphones, using my TV speakers and the issues with the audio was ten times worse. The voice acting was OK, nothing overly good or anything, but just fine.
The visuals in INDIKA was OK. They tried to go with this photorealism and they did succeed in that somewhat. The shame was that the game had some visual issues, such as, the environment did had some pop-ins, low quality textures, camera was all over the place at times, and it was all around rough around the edges. These didn’t bother the gameplay, but they were very obvious.
Final Verdict
INDIKA was rather interesting experience. It was about 4 hours long and I feel like the game could’ve been a little longer. It ended nicely but kinda too soon. Perfect the game was not; it was somewhat unpolished. INDIKA questioned many things and I cannot wait to see what the studio is bringing up next. I do recommend this little game to everyone.
INDIKA is available on PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X and Windows.
SCORE:
4/5
“The game liked to question, not just religion, but everything about life”
One More Level 