The first 20 minutes of Indika are the opposite of how I imagine you would be taught to make an opening in game design school. You know how 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted 2 and 4 open in medias res, with action sequences to get your blood pumping before flashing back to the story's more placid chronological beginning and getting you up to speed with how you got there? Indika does the opposite. It almost seems like it's testing you, daring you to quit before you get to the exciting stuff.
Beginning With Boredom In Indika
The opening does give you a brief flash of style. There's a short interlude that sets up the retro aesthetic the game occasionally dips into, as you fall down a black screen, collecting rings as you descend. After that, there's a fish-eye head-mounted camera on Indika's habit-framed face as she freaks out during a Liturgy. But, interestingly, the game then settles into pointless chores for an inordinately long time.
Indika Is The Most Gamey Game I've Ever Gamed
When games are desperate to be movies, be a game
Indika walks around the fortress-like nunnery for a while, the game pointedly giving you nothing impo𒅌rtant to do. From there, it dips even deeper into this well of boredom, when Indika is tasked with retrieving water from a literal well. The game plays a mean, little joke on you here — when you bring the bucket back and pour it into a barrel, a counter appears at the top of the screen, reading: 1/5. You mean I have to do this four more times? So I did. And when I returned the fifth time, breathing a sigh of relief as I dumped the final bucket int𝄹o the barrel, a higher-ranking nun appeared and tipped the barrel over, unceremoniously dumping the water I had worked so hard to collect onto the muddy path.
Honestly, I should have seen that coming. While Indika was pacing back and forth between the barrel and the well, a voice in her head was narrating her life. The insidious little voice (which sounds how I imagine the snake from the book of Genesis would) says "Useless labor is the basis of spiritual development" as Indika treks back from the well. To use the Hero's Journey's language, the game is setting up her "normal world." And her normal world is boring.
That voice is constantly talking to Indika, trying to taunt her into engaging. She can drown it out by praying (an actual mechanic here) but most of the time, her head booms with the mean-spirited voice monologuing poisonously in her ear. It's a very singular experience as far as games go, but it reminded me of other titles that get great mileage by soundtracking tedious work with an interesting voiceover.
When VO Makes The Game Go
The Portal games are the first that come to mind, because GLaDOS is constantly in your ꦗear as you go about your puzzle-solving. While GLaDOS provides as interesting a voiceover as any game character ever has, this comparison is iffy because solving puzzles with portals is anything but boring.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Stanley Parable's mechanics aren't tedious, but the game is set in the ultimate symbol of white-collar tedium: a bland corporate office. As the player explores, the narrator (voiced wonderfully by Kevin Brighting) reacts to their actions. He may tell you not to go down a certain hallway, advice you can choose to take, but that you’ll most likely ignore because who does this narrator guy think he is? It's a gamified version of the mind-bending puzzle the Oracle poses to Neo in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Matrix: would he have knocked over the vase if she hadn't told him not to worry about breaking the vase?
What Remains of Edith Finch is the most obvious example of this pairing. Edith narrates the entirety of the game, but one level has her reading a story over mechanics that embody blue-collar tedium. I'm talking about Lewis' story, or ‘168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the cannery sequence’, the best level of the game and possibly one of the best video game levels of the 21st century. In it, we play as Edith's deceased brother, Lewis, as he goes about his mundane tasks at a cannery, receiving fish via conveyor belt and chopping their heads off with a guillotine. Edith reads Lewis' psychiatrist report as her brother's mind wanders and begins to create a fantasy world that we control with one stick, while simultaneously trying to manage the beheadings. It's the definitive interactive statement on the power of imagination in the face of mindnumbing work.
Edith Finch is incredible. You should really check it out if you haven't.
In the short time I've spent with Indika, it's already picked up. I've seen men chase each other down rural streets and shoot each other with pistols. But those moments of violent color hit harder because the game takes time at the beginning to bore you.
If You Claim To Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics, Don't Overlook Indika
Not enough people are talking about this surreal, visually stu🌠nning game about an Orthodo♏x Christian nun’s religious crisis. I need that to change.
