#indika ilya

[xabarik]

we just finished indika with my friends. i'm in fucking tears it TORE ME APART...

[meril-tospen]

[areydell]

A fanart for them

[divinedemons]

[novikjpg]

My contribution to the Indika’s fandom.

[and-vraneh]

Тихо, мне не хватает фан творчества по этой игре...

[kumacurry]

BRO I FEEL YOU SO MUCH ABOUT INDIKA We decided for ourselves that Indika made Ilya a prosthesis with the help of her knowledge in mechanics, they worked everything out and lived happily. THE END. 👏

THANK YOU I’LL BE ACCEPTING THAT HEADCANON AS WELL

[avidaraku]

after watching a playthrough of Indika, I think it rly is so interesting seeing how expansive it is - esp after watching the demo ages ago. So many things click, like a cog in a machine, and this game has truly thrown me so many surprises at every turn, including how Indika turned into a nun.

even though I never was raised religiously in my house, there is that cultural understanding of what it means to sin and to be influenced by the fear of death and disobedience. Don't have much thoughts but I loved the ending soooo much - (spoilers!!) but I love that Indika's reflection of God and the Devil are clearly parts of her that have consumed her and that you cannot get rid of the bad if you also want to be good. You need both evil and justice, hot and cold, sharp and round - things that you think can easily exist on its own, cannot be defined by as a universality.

Sometimes I see myself as a walking corpse, and I think about my own death every time I look into the mirror. And honestly - I'm glad I can see a game clearly represent that rotting panic and urge to prove that you are not this bad person, the moments where you just have unending conversations with the worst parts of yourself and somehow everything has made you worse. I fucking LOVE that. We all have devils and gods inside of us, for better or for worse.

it is absolutely devastating when the journey comes to an end with our companion, who we decided to take a bet on, and everything goes to fucking shit. reality is often humbling and disappointing - with Ilya unable to "talk to God" and his arm will never come back. But man, did I love how the perspective of the game shifted from third person (omniscent, out of boundaries of the human realm) to first person (in reality, no longer above humanity) in the ending. It is deeply unsettling how different everything is after Indika manages to escape from her imprisonment, and how it is the devil that helps her escape. You can't tell what Indika is thinking anymore, not when now you can only see through her eyes. Even in the mirrors, when Indika stares at herself in the mirror of the pawnshop - it is the face of the Devil until the very last moment. Then you see how she's permanently changed, no longer wearing her nun habit, all her original thoughts on her journey initially coming to a hush.

it was a very bizarre but also such a cool game, I'm so glad i got to witness this journey! I would highly recommend it if you want to see some very cool displays on faith and doubt - the game gets very philosophical, unsurprisingly, but I also enjoy the Devil's voice. It's very well written and also I really enjoyed that convo between Indika and the Devil where their silhouettes were essentially merging in and out with each other in a pool of red. Probably one of my favs if u ignore the ones with Ilya haha. There's definitely more I could talk abt, but all in all, I do love how full circle this game comes. Very satisfying even if the game takes things in a crazy spin, and im sure a lot of ppl aren't used to that.

[havinganormalone]

I think Indika should have had a section where you could do sick wall jumps, and I don't even think that would be against the spirit of the game.

[meezer]

they should've had an "are you mad at me button" where you press it and indika asks ilya if he's mad at her. extremely necessary quality of life update. many people are saying this

[supergreatfrien]

Bumbling Through Indika p.3 - The Curiously Gigantic Fish Cannery

Indika and Ilya have arrived at a factory where they only know how to do things big. Maybe a little too big.

[nepotisim]

I am so tickled rn! I'm playing Indika on my PS5, and i just got a screenshot called "Abstinence". I got it for not taking any screenshot while Indika and Ilya were naked. This game is so unserious, PLEASE!

[meril-tospen]

Stranger : Husband?

Indika : Husband...

Stranger : I guess he was loved.

Indika : Yes

[canmom]

Indika (title puns? sorry i got nun)

I played that game that got a bunch of hype a few months back! Created by exiled Russian devs Odd Meter and published by the absolutely on top of their game right now 11Bit Studios, it's a uniquely AESTHETIC orthodoxcore meditation on religion and nihilism that has more than a little Tarkovsky flavour. If you've seen any review of this game you probably know the score: splendid writing and blending of aesthetic registers, spaced out by rather more orthodox (ha ha) game puzzle design.

It's very much a setpiece driven game, leading you through a series of absolutely gorgeously rendered snowy, industrial environments of increasingly surreal size, all carrying a three-way dialogue between Indika (a nun who hears the voice of the devil in her ear and seems to be experiencing some kind of psychosis), Ilya (an escaped convict who's convinced God is leading him to some great purpose, if only he can heal his rotting sepisy arm) and the devil (who only Indika can hear, cutting in with sardonic commentary every so often).

So it's a story about becoming disillusioned with religion and shaking off moralism, about desperation, about ostracisation - and a very confident one at that, full of great presentation and acting choices and provocative events.

I think the interesting question with this is like, what does it gain from being a game, rather than e.g. a movie or even a play - or for that matter a 'walking simulator' game with no challenges at all? The puzzles don't really factor into it, they mostly function as a speedbump... except, of course, that running into blatant videogame puzzles adds to the sense of unreality that is given by the strangely towering architecture and giant fish and so on, acting consonant with the chiptune/EDM in the soundtrack, the 2D pixel-art flashbacks and especially the mechanical representation of Indika's faith as a pixellated point tracker which incrementally ticks up for every religious act, a device which pays off in the final scene.

So - much like NieR, it likes to play around with the imagery of previous eras of game as symbols. The benefits of being a game are then in a sense mostly aesthetic invocations - but it does make interesting use of them, e.g. a monster-chase sequence unexpectedly seguing into an argument with the devil about the different motives of humans and animals as the camera rolls to follow the defeated boss around a water wheel.

Honestly, the camerawork in this game is really something special - making all sorts of clever uses of curved lenses and striking compositions that really allow you to feel the weight of the environments. Besides the well-shot cutscenes, you can sit on benches in various places and switch through a series of striking camera angles. But equally, you get a far stronger sense of the moody setpieces when you are walking through them to figure out a path, compared to if you simply saw them in the background of an establishing shot.

There is also the matter of taking the characters and environment, which you might take for granted in a film, and drawing them into the realm of something constructed. To film a real convent covered in snow is one thing; to meticulously build snow shaders which respond to footfalls and perfectly convey the sparkling mushy texture of melting snow is perhaps a different statement, much as animated a movement and filming it conveys different emphases. Perhaps this is just the tech artist talking, but a significant part of the expression comes in walking around as Indika and observing the wind catching her wimple and the carefully designed ways she stumbles and fidgets. So yeah yeah, the medium is still the goddamn message.

Environment design and rendering seem to be real strong points for Odd Meter - sure, anyone can take the off the shelf engine features of Unreal, but it takes a lot of skill to really make it sing cohesively. Their previous game is a VR archery game called Sacralith, and while it doesn't seem to have the same artistic ambitions as Indika, I'm terribly curious to try it out now.

Definitely recommend giving this one a look. It's a pretty digestible four hours to play, so basically two movies. Which feels appropriate for this type of strongly narrative-focused game - very much for short focused games these days...

[necromancy-enthusiast]

Started playing the game Indika, it's really beautiful and interesting and at least the Russian voice acting is good, I haven't bothered listening to the English... But I think we need to come up with other ways to quickly get the idea of 'ok obviously this guy is bad but he could be worse' across besides having a male character kill a rapist and then soon after explicitly confirm that he would never rape someone in media aimed at adults. It gets tiresome once you notice it, especially when he kills a rapist to save a major female character. Given the circumstances of Ilya's introduction and how fast things go south almost immediately upon his introduction, I do think they needed to very quickly establish the fact that he has some standards even though he's not afraid of doing bad things if it serves him, but it feels like an evolution of mostly male writers using sexual assault for the sake of cheap shock value instead of giving it the gravity it deserves (hello, Game of Thrones). I could probably write up some nice eloquent thing about it if I stewed on it longer.

I do still love Ilya, though.

[darthteeth]

god talking to Ilya: I'm going to save you im going to get you to a righteous path

satan talking to indika: right here right now I'm going to get you dick