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Indika review - a dark, surreal, and devilishly playful drama
Eurogamer's review of Indika, where bleak realism meets absurdist fairytale in a stylish, surreal, and astonishingly surefooted exploration of faith.
But Indika the game is nothing if not wilfully unpredictable, deftly exploiting its audio-visual toolkit - those convincingly solid yet increasingly ephemeral environments, subtly defying the laws of physics, space, time, and scale; absurd camera angles gleefully underpinning the artifice of it all; a skittish soundscape churning between grinding industrial oppression and cratering abyssal silence - to create a deeply unnerving sense of dreamlike unreality. Indika's writer and director Dmitry Svetlow has called Russia's invasion of the Ukraine an "insane crime" perpetrated by an "elderly, weak-minded dwarf", and it's hard not to see at least some modern-day parallels as the now-Kazakhstan-based Moscow developer Odd Meter's tale of youth fleeing oppressive control unfolds. But as intentional as its unabashedly video game-y action may be (and, yes, it's hard to dismiss the endlessly amusing incongruity of a nun shimmying and shoving her way across the bleak Russian winter like Lara Croft in a wimple), it can be tough to reconcile its more obnoxious moments when you're, say, trapped in a slightly wearying trial-and-error pursuit sequence.
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