Indicate
Release: First quarter of 2024 Available for: PC, PS5, Xbox Series Genre: Action-Adventure Developer: Odd Meter Games Publisher: 11Bit Studios
Odd Meter Games is a small indie studio currently based in Almaty, Kazakhstan. That was not always so. The developers are Russian and left their country in the wake of the Russian attack on Ukraine. They condemn war and deal with the Russian Orthodox Church of an alternative timeline in their game, Indika.
Criticism or defamation of the church is now forbidden in Russia, as it plays a fundamental role in the propaganda apparatus. The Polish publisher 11bit (Frostpunk, This war of mine) took the developers under its wing and helped to cut “all formal and business relationships” with the home country. After playing through the comprehensive Indika demo on Steam, you learn little about how political this game, developed in exile, wants to be. The only thing you can be sure of is that you’ve seen one of the more original games in recent years.
Hell is a state
Indika is a very artistic mixture of arthouse horror, which the production company A24 usually brings to the cinemas and which is then called It Follows or Midsommar, and wild design ideas that so often come from Eastern Europe. In just under an hour that the demo lasts, there is more artistic dexterity and unerring aesthetics than in most other games that are otherwise developed by small teams (and larger ones too).
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The game wallows in the disruption it creates when the young nun suddenly speaks past the audience to a devilish narrator, when pixelated video game symbols and a rudimentary high score overlay a distant yet depressingly true-to-life pre-Soviet winter desolation. The choice of some camera settings is truly impressive.
The mood is consistently strange, unreal, disturbing. This begins with Indika’s companion, a prison escapee named Ilya, who had previously taken her hostage, and whose arm, stinking of gangrene, is fortunately only shown briefly at the beginning. He is sure that he cannot die anyway, as he says he is chosen by God. As soon as you wonder for a few meters that the play here is surprisingly conventional, but at the same time quite fluffy and competent – moving ladders, making elevators go up and down, pretty analogue seesaw puzzles – a bloodthirsty dog the size of a cow jumps on you to whom Indika tries to appease as a “good dog”. A monster for us “normal people”, threatening for Indika and Ilya, but otherwise not strange? The protagonists and we are visibly on different levels of perception, and the developers play with this effectively.
The Indika demo in pictures
There’s one hell of an escape sequence that I had to play several times until I solved it, but it really left me on the edge of my seat. And at one or two points, it becomes completely surreal for Indika as she threatens to lose her mind under the constant nagging of the devil “Chort”, which literally tears her world apart. Hold the right mouse button to pray and watch the corridor magically reassemble itself into its normal version. The story has rarely been so skilfully linked to a game mechanism – in this case a climbing puzzle in which you push platforms back and forth by alternating between reason and madness. Very successful and visually impressive.
In general, this is also true for the rest of the game, because not only the art direction but even the technology is convincing. Indika’s veil blows in the wind in a physically accurate manner. Even when she is not doing anything, her lifelike face is extremely expressive and her other physical habits, from biting her fingernails to her downcast gaze, speak more than a thousand words.
Indie in design and theme, playfully down-to-earth – good mix
I like that the entire orientation leans extremely towards indie arthouse, but in terms of play everything stays more on the familiar action-adventure carpet. Nevertheless, the game reveals a certain level of sophistication, which shows that elements from other third-person titles were not simply borrowed here. For example, Indika’s hand automatically moves to the handle of a rolling container, which you can move to use as a climbing aid, even before you press the interaction button. That looks pretty elegant. And otherwise nothing is stiff or awkward here.
The Indika demo plays well – and then ends on a tracking shot that will stay with me for a long time. An exciting title to keep an eye on.