Does a podcast have a soul?
Welcome back to Describing the Skybox! Today, we’re going to be talking about Indika, a (mostly) 3D adventure game in which you play as a nun with the devil on her shoulder. Describing Indika in typical genre terms is maybe not extremely descriptive, suffice to say that if you like experimental narrative-focused games, you will likely get along with Indika pretty well. Not to say that it doesn’t have mechanics, you just do a lot of different things as you move through the story. Indika (the game) really lives fast and dies young taking you through a whirlwind of different puzzles, platforming, chase sequences, minigames, vehicle…segments…kind of, and then ending in under five hours. This makes it a great one to two sitting type of game that leaves you with a lot to digest. Without getting into spoilers, the story focuses a lot faith, power structures, whether the choices we make are really ours, lighthearted stuff, mostly, and treated in a serious manner while still maintaining a sharp sense of humor. Certainly not for everyone, but Indika makes a lot of bold choices and does so while still being competently made and engaging. We’re going to be talking about why the medium of games is so integral to the story this game is trying to tell, the slow unravelling of the world and characters, and we let slip a major spoiler that will leave any third graders in the audience devastated.
Thank you for joining us again this week! In the overall scheme of how we decide games to play, sometimes we’ll just put a game on the list because we wanted to try it and didn’t have time otherwise. Sometimes this ends up being just okay, but I am very happy with how this game turned out. Did you play the game, and if so, did it work for you? If you didn’t play the game but listened to the episode were you like “giant tuna cans? What?” Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Demon’s Souls, which feels kind of overdue but better late than never. We hope you’ll join us then!