My spoil free summary is, imagine a Russian novelist flirting with Suda 51.

While by and large a walking simulator, Indika has some decent and clever puzzles, some mini games, and some downright creative settings. My personal favorite puzzles were the ones where Indika has to use the unique aspects of a hallucination, such as her frustrations shattering the world, and her penitence repairing it, or a portal-esque Escher room with seeingly shifting gravity. The retro memory bits do eventually pay off, but until they do it really does feel like a gimmick. Thankfully, it really does pay off in the end.

While there is a dark humor to Indika's surreal setting, the focus is largely on deconstructing choices, decisions, and the nature of free will. I found myself impressed on more than one occasion with the conversations and counterpoints continuing past the points they usually end at with other "philosophical wank" games. Furthermore, our growing understanding of Indika and her travel companion organically feed into that topic, and we gain fascinating perspective into how circumstance, expectations, and environment can manipulate choices to such a degree that the very concept of "sin" itself can, and perhaps must, be questioned. And then a nun uses a forklift to arrange giant cans of fish and solve a climbing puzzle.

Gamification and video game tropes are used as metaphors in a number of ways, underscoring a surprisingly deep study of what makes people choose the things that they choose. There's a running gag throughout the game involving "points" - despite a point-based "level-up" system being present, complete with there being a point tally in the upper-left of the screen at all times, the game tells you flat-out that the points are meaningless. And yet, you get rewarded with points every time you find religious objects or perform a contextual act of worship. This does pay off in the finale, in a way that left me quite shook.

On that matter - the ending is very nihilistic and interpretive. I personally found the ending quite powerful and haunting, to the point where I'm gonna be replaying Indika with a whole new perspective (and that's saying something, as the only other walking simulator I have ever replayed was What Remains Of Edith Finch), but I have also heard there are many people disappointed with and even mad at what they consider a "non-ending". This is gonna be a "your mileage may vary" situation.

CW/TW stuff: There's two scenes depicting SA that don't show anything, but the implications are still very disturbing. There's one particularly poignant but nonetheless disturbing scene involving a dead animal. There's also some very brief and heavily obscured nudity; a setting in the options lets you censor it. And, of course, the general horrors of war, disease, and that generally gross early 20th Century Eastern European aesthetic.

I can now say I've played a game about a piano-climbing nun that has some poignant things to say about the human condition.