Indika in the test: The most difficult game of the year – but different than you think

Marked spoilers will follow, so you can skip the relevant paragraphs if you haven't played Indika yet.

It was already clear to me that Indika would not, strictly speaking, be what you would call fun. The adventure about a nun who is convinced that she is the devil, developed by the exiled Russians at Odd Meter, is an art house project through and through. Pretty as a picture, but quirky and uncomfortable, Indika often comes across as quite nihilistic and left me with an almost desperate emptiness.

Basically, it's pointless to slap on a star rating based on “normal” video game perspectives. I can judge it just by the intensity with which I experienced it. The many scenes that will stay with me for a long time in terms of style and imagery, even if I still have to nibble on some details to decipher their meaning. It was a ride like I've rarely experienced – and mostly very convincing, both technically and in the modest playful framework in which it operates.

While Indika is clearly a vibe and message-first title, I was regularly surprised at how good the traditional video game interludes were. Moving platforms and ladders, elevator puzzles, and even the 16-bit inserts that illustrate Indika's past played solidly (minus the occasionally twitchy controls) in a way that surprised me. Again and again I felt the great desire to capture a wonderfully dark camera angle or a splendidly decorated set on a screenshot. Even the English speakers do everything right.

Above all, Odd Meter plays with your perception in an artful way as it sends you through a meaningful caricature of an early 20th century Russia. We never quite find out how much of this world going crazy into a feverish sensory tilt is due to Indika's condition – she clearly has serious mental problems. But the image of a city whose horizon is almost completely filled several times by overwhelmingly huge church bells is, against the background of this plot, an image that you can't get out of your head:

Odd Meter portrays the church and faith several times as an abused instrument of power, used from above to oppress and control the population, especially women. This criticism of the church as an organ runs through the entire game when we collect points for a meaningless skill tree that increases our piety level, which the game itself describes as meaningless in its tutorial texts. Several times we see Indika literally praying away her mental disorder, which is one of the game's best ideas, integrating immersive platform puzzles. This is doubly bitter because we cannot rule out that her psychological disorder was not caused by the church's dealings with allegedly sinful people. We also see how church representatives and the military work together, how religion is used as a weapon – and how much we sometimes rely on it.

SPOILERS FOR INDIKA FINALE in the following paragraph. If you want to experience it yourself, jump straight to the conclusion

The final scene shows how Indika and Ilia fall away from the faith in parallel, with drastically different outcomes for both. While Ilia sells off the long-sought treasure for little money and indulges in alcohol, Indika's self-perception as a deformed demon dissolves the moment she sees religion as a man-made construct. We don't see what happens to Ilia after that. But the joy of Indika's healthy self-image quickly fades and turns into a formless emptiness as her gaze – forcefully staged from the first-person perspective in the last section – wanders searchingly over the carelessly lying around trinkets in the pawn shop. About silent instruments, parts of a home and polished promises made of brass or gold. A quietly desperate search for a new meaning in life. It's the last thing we experience before the credits roll. Biting cold that crawls down the back on long fingers.

Indica conclusion

You can certainly read a lot from Indika and even see some things substantially differently. Especially if you have a closer cultural connection to the region, you might pick up on details that I missed. But I was very intrigued by this cool, blunt reckoning with organized religion as a control mechanism. At the end, you can't help but feel great regret and sympathy for Ilia and Indika, who – betrayed, deceived, abused – lose the very support that apparently ensured their survival until now. Odd Meter has no answer for what comes next. That's bitter but true.