For many years the “walking simulator” genre of games has had one core flaw: moving game characters around a world is more like piloting a vehicle than actually moving around a space. Telling a narrative heavy story in games is a perfect match: they allow us to literally inhabit the characters whose stories we hear, to watch from their eyes, to have their realities reflected to us mechanically in order to feel alongside them. Despite this, many narrative games struggle with total immersion – there’s a tendency to want to remove “game-y” aspects with the intention to keep the player grounded in the story. I’ve spoken before on how designer Hideo Kojima deals with this by simply making the interaction of the form the text of the game, by having in-game characters refer to metatextual aspects, such as instructing other characters to “press the action button” or “turn off the game console”. We don’t currently have the ability to provide fully immersive story telling experiences with 1:1 motion, so one way is to simply let the characters in on the bit.
Indika expands the possibilities of the kinds of stories that games can tell. There’s certainly a growing number of non-traditional settings and perspectives, especially in modern independent games, but few choose to use the language and aesthetic markings of video games the way that Indika does. In the game’s juxtaposition of gaming aesthetic and alternate history Eastern Europe circa late 19th century, developer Odd Meter manages to increase synchronicity with the ongoing story, not distract from it. Indika is about many things, but the motifs of futility, faith, and reward remain consistent throughout. The game opens with the titular character, Indika, being forced out of the Eucharist by her fellow sisters for accidentally colliding with a priest after a vision (presented in pixelated, classic game format) of herself falling through the sky. After a brief stroll through the convent, Indika is tasked with filling up a barrel of water from a nearby well. Indika makes you do it. All of it. You will lower a bucket into a well, carry that bucket to the barrel, and dump the bucket about five times, moving agonizingly slowly.
After the task is complete, the woman who gives you the task comes out of her home and dumps the barrel all over the snow. Indika is chock full of moments like this, that strip away the flashy slight of hand and present to you the reality of games as explicit text. What was all that for? This is what games do – they give us objectives that, in a real sense, don’t matter and reset upon their completion so they may be accomplished again. In another fantastic moment, Indika debates the nature of choice and free will in a world where people can be so easily compelled by external obligation. Is this really choice? Or just an illusion? Almost entirely parallel to this exact point, the game presents you with a split hallway. One continues the story – the other leads around a corner to a dead-end. It’s on-the-nose and games like The Stanley Parable were lampooning this over ten years ago, but the masterstroke is in how Indika is still deeply interested in being an honest-to-goodness narrative game. It isn’t trying to be a deconstruction or a parody, these are real thoughts, real introspection on the nature of art, and the game is fully taking advantage of the format in a way that few seem able to.
One of the best aspects of Indika is the points system, a running count of the number of “points” that Indika has obtained over her adventure. Collect enough points, and Indika levels up. These level ups serve only to either add a percentage chance of increasing total points collected every time one receives points, or providing a flat increase to the number of points you already have. One can intuit that these points are largely futile, especially considering the game tells you as much. However, they remain omnipresent throughout the adventure and are granted after finding small artifacts. Their true purpose, tied back into the very end of the game, comes at the very end – a large part of the narrative of Indika involves the finding of an artifact called the Kudets, which is said to be able to cure physical afflictions. At the end, Indika finds herself with the Kudets in hand, having encountered many crises of faith. The player can press a button to shake the points out of the Kudets, leveling up as much as they want. I tried to see how long the game would let me do this, and there seemed to be no end. Those points you couldn’t help but seek out? How does it feel now that they’re in infinite supply? That you can make your level go as high as you like? Just like the water barrel, the task wasn’t meaningless. It was what you felt along the way – the context and the suffering and the lessons. To expect our actions to earn us some sort of favor with a higher power, for the expectation of deeper reward or ultimate conclusion that will pull back the curtain on all the sound and fury is an exercise in futility. All we have is the now and the meaning we derive from the moment to moment lives we lead.