Review | Indika - The Real Horrors Were The Friends We Made Alone The Way

Going into Indika, I was excited to see what this horror game had in store for me. However, it was nothing like what I was expecting, and having now finished the game, I’m still I’m not sure if it was a good thing or not. While the premise is great, there wasn’t actually anything scary about the game, taking a decided turn of the philosophical early on and never looking back. Sure, there were moments when you thought you were about to experience something terrifying, but it never came.

If you play Indika expecting a Layers of Fear with Russian nuns and keep that point in mind, lower your expectations a little, and you’ll find that it is actually a really fun, if baffling, game in its own right. 

Mish-Mash Styles

Upon opening the game for the first time, I was greeted with a minimalist pixellated menu. This surprised me, considering the photorealistic screenshots I’d seen on Steam: I was expecting a bigger budget cinematic narrative on par with Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, but now I wasn’t so sure. The first scene of the game confused me even more- why was I a pixellated girl floating through space, and what was up with the points I was collecting?

Once the scene was over, the game got into the thick of it, introducing the HD 3D graphics that were advertised initially. The art style was a little uncanny valley when it came to the character models (which is somewhat fitting for such a surreal game), but the rest of the world was beautifully put together.

After the pixellated menu, I couldn’t be sure if the graphics would stay as three-dimensional as they appeared. And sure enough, as the game progressed, there were playable cutscenes in the most stunning pixellated graphics. 

The art style for the pixellated scenes is just gorgeous, while the subtle colour scheming across detailed 3D locations is particularly magnificent. However, the transition between the two can be very jarring and something I can only assume is designed to represent different parts of Indika’s life. For example, when Indika experiences flashbacks to her childhood, it is primarily when we see the pixelated art style show up. 

Although it was pretty, it was still kind of baffling and could be quite jarring, depending on the scenes that happened before. And Indika definitely isn’t the sort of game that is interested in taking a break to explain what this is meant to represent or mean, so the tone shifting can all feel a bit breakneck sometimes.

Comedy Over Horror?

I have to admit, while I was playing the game, I found it rather comedic at points. It baffled me even more so, as I really couldn’t tell if Indika’s goal was to be a horror game, a dark comedy, a contemplation on the nature of faith, or all three.  

The devilish narrator was the best part of the game for me. He is the reason Indika is descending into madness and rebelling against the Church, and his veiled threats (and overt threats) give the game the excitement and conflict that it needs to keep you going over its short runtime. 

Despite these two factors, the game felt strangely relaxing for the vast majority. While I was helping out an incredibly shady man and the lightly steampunky Russia is weird, Indika just doesn’t quite have the horror elements its pulpy trapping deserves. 

It’s also worth noting that the beginning of the game is incredibly slow, and it was very hard for me to remain immersed purely because every task is so laborious. Although Indika tells you there’s a sprint option, the beginning takes this away, forcing you to walk at a snail’s pace throughout. 

One scene, in particular, made the whole game feel very much like a self-aware joke, and I genuinely have no idea what it was meant to represent or if that particular part of the game was meant to be scary. During a scene in the Church, Indika is hallucinating and starts seeing a tiny person inside one of the other Nuns’ mouths. The person then begins to bounce around the room. If that sounds weird out of context, I can assure you even with the full context, I couldn’t begin to explain what this was meant to mean.

Teething Issues

In terms of accessibility, the game is lacking ever so slightly. The options menu just isn’t extensive enough for a modern title, as you can’t change your keybinds in any way whatsoever. Additionally, the game was poorly optimised. Despite having a decent piece of hardware to run Indika, I often ran poorly.

During my playthrough, there was a lot of screen tearing and huge frame drops, even on the lowest settings and with DLSS turned on. At times, it really took away from the experience and made some of the high-speed chase scenes a bit difficult to get through.

Unless I just wasn’t paying attention, there is no acknowledgement of when you last saved or if you’ve hit a checkpoint. As a result, this meant that I had to do the entire beginning chapter again because I quit before the game was saved, wasting thirty minutes. This put me on edge, as I felt that I had to complete the game in one sitting, and I had no idea where it would put me if I tried to quit and came back to it.

As spoken about by many online, there are some suspicious paintings scattered throughout the game. If you look carefully enough, you’ll see that the hands of Jesus and other holy figures are distorted and are seemingly AI-generated. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be a one-off painting either, as there are many throughout the game that suffer the same fate.

Whether or not it is AI is still unknown, but with how glaringly obvious it seems, it’s a huge disappointment. It’s also somewhat surprising when you consider how singular an artistic vision of the rest of the game has that such an element would be left up to ChatGPT or something

Overall, Indika is a fun experience if you separate the horror genre tag on Steam from it. It feels more like a dark comedy than anything else, and there aren’t really that many other video games with a tone even remotely similar. That being said, it feels as if it lacks polish, and AI art is a glaring issue, especially with the looming threat of it in the art sector at the moment. 

Hopefully, with future updates, keybinds can be changed, and there will be more accessibility features added for those who need them.