Indika is a bit like an old Resident Evil with no combat but more Satan, and its freaky Next Fest demo has made it my most anticipated game this year

GamesIndikaIndika is a bit like an old Resident Evil with no combat but more Satan, and its freaky Next Fest demo has made it my most anticipated game this yearWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Odd Meter)

The titular protagonist of adventure game Indika, surrounded by jeering nuns.

No game has ever readThe Master and Margaritaas much asIndikahas read The Master and Margarita. A third-person adventure game from Odd Meter, a Russian studio thatleft the countryafter the invasion of Ukraine, Indika already seems like so much more than that clatter of marketing-team-whiteboard genre adjectives makes it sound, and its Steam Next Fest demo has instantly made it my most anticipated game of the year so far.

(Image credit: Odd Meter)

A close-up of Indika’s face, the subtitles read: “Don’t do it!"

It is confidently and knowingly bizarre from the main menu onwards. I had been excited to play Indika ever since I stumbled across it on Steam some time last year, but the vision of it I held in my head was always an off-kilter walking simulator: Dear Esther with a sense of humour.

I was not prepared for the chiptunes to kick in as Indika and Ilya rode their combination stove/bicycle through the snow, nor the hints of 16-bit pixel art in the game’s UI. I certainly wasn’t ready to stumble across a statuette of Paraskeva of the Balkans in a house full of eyeless icons ofChrist Pantocrator, and for the discovery to tip me over to a literal level-up screen where I had to choose whether to spec into Repentance or Guilt (I went Repentance: it had better long-term build potential).

(Image credit: Odd Meter)

A level-up screen from Indika, showing an option called “Guilt”.

Odd Meter has read its Gogol as well as its Bulgakov, and boy if it isn’t going to show off about it

Oh, you do also have toplaythe thing, of course, an experience that rarely got in the way of enjoying the psychedelic narrative. The demo delivers you from small hub to small hub, each one containing some central puzzle you need to solve to progress and a bunch of nooks and crannies to explore for hagiographies, religious icons, and other things which gradually accumulate XP in the top left of your screen.

(Image credit: Odd Meter)

Indika reads a letter while the word falls apart around her.

The puzzles strike the right balance, for the most part: demanding you engage the problem-solving part of your brain to some extent without tipping over into frustration. Think the older Resident Evil games and you have a pretty good idea. Find the right-shaped key to go in a hole, find the open window that leads into a locked house, traverse a fragmented dreamspace with the power of thehesychasmwhile the devil taunts you about your banishment from the monastery. You know, puzzle game stuff.

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A section toward the end in which you have to flee that enormous dog I talked about earlier did see Indika meet several grisly deaths before I trial-and-error’d my way to the correct route, but that was the exception rather than the rule, at least for the demo.

(Image credit: Odd Meter)

A dead dog hangs limply in a wooden while while two human figures, Ilya and Indika, stand silhouetted in the background.

You can find Indika and its Steam Next Fest demo over on, well,Steam.

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