After a forum poll I picked up Indika for the PS5 - I wanted to play this game in turns with my partner as I thought she might be intrigued by it and my living room doesn’t currently have easy access to PC games.
Thoughts below (mild spoilers)...
I didn’t realise how little I knew about the game until we started playing, just that it was popular on the forums really. That meant I had the rather magical experience of thinking this was a period piece, only to gradually notice strange things about the world as it became increasingly apparent we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
First of all, we noticed a giant goat at the monastery, then the train scene was… odd, an upside down house, on and on as each new area became increasingly impractical and unsettling - with not a single comment from the characters that anything was amiss. I think people acting unfazed in bizarre and unbelievable situations is a core tenet of surrealism and executed very well here. The game also manages to maintain this escalation of weirdness throughout its runtime. It was a world that somehow felt very coherent and expansive to me, like the game was only a small part of something much deeper.
My experience was marred significantly by unpleasant technical issues on PS5. I don’t know what this is like on PC but the framerate fluctuations were absolutely wild and the sound balancing was terrible - somes scenes featured Indika yelling almost to the point of causing me physical pain while Ilya was barely audible. Issues of this nature were constant throughout, and kept me from giving myself over to the game experience in the way I think it deserved.
In the moment, it made me feel negatively about the game but afterwards the whole experience sort of sat with me. I kept thinking about the various character arcs, their motivations, the subtext and finding new depth and significance at almost every turn. I feel like almost nothing happens in this game that doesn’t serve to elevate the overall theming. My partner and I had a really long discussion a couple days later about the game that helped solidify and contextualize all the thoughts that had been rolling around in my head.
I will say, I didn’t really like the 16-bit sections. The story they told was cool, and I can see what they might have been going for but it just didn’t work for me. However, super happy I played this game so thanks to all the people on the forum who recommended it! I guess it would slot in just behind UFO 50 in my GOTY list.