Steam Next Fest has brought us too many game demos for any one person to play, but one that’s been on my radar for a while is Indika, a game by Russian studio Odd Meter about a nun struggling with her faith. That topic is right up my alley, and the game trailer’s unusual art house vibes made me even more curious about it. Having played the demo, it is definitely weird, but mostly in a good way.
In a conversation with Odd Meter founder Dmitry Svetlow in November, he told me Indika is “a classical adventure game, but it's kind of not,” calling it “very story-driven. So there will be a lot of cutscenes, a lot of dialogues. No fighting, no shooting, just solving puzzles.”
This proved true during the demo, which contains a contextless slice from the game in which nun Indika and a prisoner named Ilya have been thrown together in some unexplained but stressful circumstances in what appears to be rural Russia. In the half hour or so the demo lasts, you control Indika as she pilots a motorbike, explores a ruined factory, and solves some environmental puzzles to progress through a snowy landscape. The setting is beautiful, with wonderfully-realized snow (my favorite!); the factory seems to dreamily grow bigger as you explore it, full of rusting machinery and ominous creaks. Indika herself feels small and light to control in a way I found lovely, giving the demo a peaceful feeling that’s intriguingly at odds with its soundtrack and subject matter.
Alongside the gentleness of controlling a nun in a flowing habit and pausing to pray at icons (which help you level up), there’s a certain contradictory aggression to the game, largely focused on faith. While driving the motorbike in the demo’s opening, Ilya and Indika get in an argument about God, with Ilya unexpectedly taking the more devout viewpoint. It’s not clear from the demo exactly what’s brought Indika to this point, but she’s clearly grappling with her faith, though hasn’t left it completely. She also gets into arguments with an unseen narrator whom I think is the Devil, with him ferociously poking holes in her understanding of sin and obedience and laughing at her if the player causes her to die. At one point, you use prayer to navigate a spatial puzzle, changing the landscape from the peaceful ruins to a twisted mass of blazing sounds and light. The demo’s tone swings wildly, from calm to violent, academic to personal, leaving me feeling off-center, the way Indika seems to feel as her faith unravels.
Faith is a topic Indika sets out to explore, with Svetlow telling me that “the game is about ‘who is God?’” Svetlow grew up religious, though he feels differently about it now, and in particular struggles with the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He told me, “I don't really feel good about church in general... [Indika] is about religion, but religion is a kind of setting of the game. And I believe that the story could happen not in Russia, and maybe not in the Russian Orthodox Church, because it’s mostly about the human and some personal problems... The second layer of the story is religion itself. And if you noticed, I don't really think that it's a very good thing, because even now, the Church is, like, helping Putin to do what he does, which is madness.”
Svetlow and the majority of the Odd Meter team left Russia for Kazakhstan due to the war, though when we talked in November some had since gone back. “For each person, the reason [for leaving] is a bit different,” he said. “For some guys, they had to leave because they could have been [drafted]. It’s not the case for me because I'm old enough, and many guys on our team are too old, to be brought into the army. And for me, it was just very uncomfortable to be there. Because even if you see that 99% of the people around you don't agree with [the war] and hate the Putin government, it's difficult not to feel like you're part of it.”
“That moment [I left Russia was] like I lost almost, I don't know, half of my weight,” Svetlow said. “I would say it was the most difficult time in my life. I wouldn't say that before, I wouldn't expect it to be so hard, I don't know why. I think [I] didn't know how much we're connected to some ideas, like ideas of your nationality, of your country, of your homeland– you don't have a chance to reflect [on] it inside yourself. And when such things happen, you start to dig very, very deep inside you, and you find so [much] interesting and difficult stuff.”
When I asked if he thought he would go back to Russia one day, Svetlow said, “I hope so, yes, but not earlier than Putin will go or die.”
In our conversation, both Svetlow and Indika publisher 11 bit studios (whom you might most know from the emotionally wrenching civilian survival sim This War of Mine) were aware of the effect Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have on the game, especially as controversy swirled around games like Atomic Heart and game companies stopped selling their games in Russia. In October 2023, 11 bit wrote in a statement, “The working relationship between Odd Meter and 11 bit studios was long underway when Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine took place. These horrific events put both the developer and the publisher in a difficult situation with a complicated path forward.” It wrote that part of the game’s revenue will go to “help children affected by the war in Ukraine.”
Svetlow told me he “remembered the call” with 11 bit after the war started, in which he said he’d understand if the publisher didn’t want to work with Odd Meter anymore. But 11 bit stood by the game, writing in its statement that “most importantly, we didn’t interfere with the game content, its theme, or the story… With its artistic value at stake, any sort of censorship would imply our lack of confidence.”
That confidence in Odd Meter’s storytelling feels clear in the demo, which is unapologetically arty and weird. Svetlow told me most of the studio were architects before moving on to game development, and said they were inspired by art from outside of games, including the literary work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The game’s trailers and its demo have a jazzy soundtrack that feel wonderfully at odds with its serious setting. The swings in topic and tone make the demo feel a bit all over the place, but in a way that feels intentional and largely compelling.
There was one moment in the demo where I felt the tone swung too far into the grim, during an ending chase sequence against a (maybe?) supernatural enemy. After the engaging, high-minded conversation and the thoughtful lightness of controlling Indika, I found this sequence stressful and a little disturbing, especially with the violent imagery at its very end. With context from more of the game (or not played late at night when I was tired and not quite ready for action), this might not have struck me so hard, and your mileage may vary.
But this also fits with what Indika seems to be setting out to do. In our conversation, when I asked about the game’s Russian influences, Svetlow said of Russian writers that “you maybe noticed or heard that all of them are kind of, you know, difficult to read, difficult to understand, [with] ideas that are very dark and serious sometimes, [and] sometimes difficult to read about. So we wanted to do something similar in our game.”
You can play the Indika demo until the end of Next Fest on February 12, and Indika is currently slated for a release in the early part of 2024.
