Indika (2024) - Odd Beast

This game was developed by Odd Meter and it’s definitely an odd beast. It’s essentially the story of a young nun in the late 1800s in Russia and her struggle with mental illness and the way that struggle entwines with her spiritual experiences and her faith. If this does not seem like material particularly well-suited to a video game, well, you’re not wrong, but there are a lot of fascinating things about this game.

As the game begins, Indika is given the task of delivering a letter from her nunnery to a nearby monastery and, for the first time in what is perhaps years, she finds herself returning to the outside world. Soon enough she is torn between continuing on her assigned journey or making a detour to a site where she believes she might be cured of her “demonic possession.” What the player realizes, though Indika doesn’t, is that her “demonic possession” is actually schizophrenia. As she journeys, she crosses paths with a wounded Russian soldier and, mainly because neither of them would survive without the other, they travel together through a desolate and war-torn winter landscape.

Among the things that really works about this game, I would say the visuals are probably the top tier element. The entire game takes place in a mostly deserted, snow-covered and dirty landscape. You spend some time exploring grimy factories and railroad stations as well as frozen lakes and snowy mountains. The game is genuinely very atmospheric and I never got tired of the beautiful visuals. There are also a few mini-games scattered here and there that evoke gaming styles from past generations. One of the best is when Indika, as a small girl, has to platform her way up a building to reach the roof to meet her friend, Mikhail. These sequences are really striking and make for jarring (in a good way) shifts from the photo-realism of the bulk of the game. As well, I have to give a lot of praise to the score by Mike Sabadash, Daniil Tsovin & Aleksey Stepanov. The game is set in the 1800s in a mostly rural environment, but the score is electronic, filled with ambient textures, dissonant metallic soundscapes and, occasionally, surprisingly hot beats.

But does the game earn its serious subject matter by actually having something meaningful to say about faith, mental illness, religion and war? Unfortunately, I have to say it doesn’t. I found the moment to moment gameplay to mainly be kind of aimless wandering and tedious puzzle solving. There’s a really interesting mechanic where Indika will undergo hallucinations and you have to move through the environment as she is hallucinating it and then, at certain points, pray in order to restore the world to reality. In order to progress through some of these platforming and puzzle sections, you have to spend some time in the real world and some in the hallucinated world and I thought that was a very interesting idea, but it’s underutilized and is never quite as imaginative as I wish it was. Likewise, the constant philosophical bickering between Indika and the soldier Ilya gets old pretty quickly and never really explores the ideas with sufficient depth.

Then, at the climax, things go spectacularly off the rails in my opinion and I thought the last thirty minutes or so of the story just became really bad. If the game had pulled off some sort of genuinely moving ending, I would have forgiven some of the things that I struggled with along the way, but it just doesn’t. So, this is a game that I more admire than enjoy and I find it hard to recommend. It’s ambitious in ways I wish more games were, but I also wish that this game was better at actually fulfilling those ambitions. There’s much here that I really liked, but also much that I found very disappointing and tedious. Which side will you land on? Hard to say, but I found myself ultimately coming down with an overall negative feeling toward the game. I suppose I’m glad I played it in some ways, but it’s deeply, unforgivably flawed.

A Better World (2024) - Sarah Langan

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. After being absolutely blown away by Sarah Langan’s first three horror novels and really loving her comeback thriller, Good Neighbors, her fifth novel is where I find shipwreck. I gave all four of her first novels my highest rating, four stars. But with A Better World, I think she takes several missteps, even though there are some things to like about it.

She’s once again mining the claustrophobic terror of toxic communities, but if Good Neighbors was her most grounded exploration of this, she goes back in a hard speculative direction with A Better World, though she still mostly eschews the kind of supernatural elements that defined her first three novels. In A Better World, the community at its heart is Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town that has things that are in very short supply in the real world: breathable air, affordable food, education. This novel obviously takes place in a dystopian future where things are worse than they are now, but the seeds for this world have certainly been sown in our own. In short, the world is hellish enough that when the Farmer-Bowen family gets the opportunity to move into Plymouth Valley, it seems like the choice is easy, even if it requires losing a certain amount of personal autonomy and privacy. Requires occasionally participating in some kind of weird rituals. Requires adhering to a mysterious new religion called Hollow. To that point, I was loving the set-up and there are definitely stretches of the book that work well. There’s a swanky dinner that goes awkwardly wrong in a way that hits every social anxiety trigger that I absolutely loved, for instance. And Langan remains enough of a prose stylist that the book is very readable. Sentence to sentence, it’s well-written; there’s no question about that.

But the book has a couple of problems. For the first time, Langan tries to bring in some satire and it just plays too broad. There were occasionally some minor satirical elements in her earlier novels, but they were very minor. Here, the satire is a much bigger part of the book and I just didn’t find it to be either particularly funny or particularly incisive. For instance, every family in Plymouth Valley is required to take care of a Caladrius, a large, flightless, genetically engineered bird. This entire subplot just seems pointless and silly. It’s never funny, it doesn’t add anything to the story and it just kind of made me cringe. It feels included only to make the book a bit more speculative than it already is. Also, the story doesn’t ever quite dig deeply enough into the more interesting elements of the community. The book spends a lot of time trying to build mystery around Hollow, the strange religion that the people in Plymouth Valley follow, but ultimately the book never delves into it deeply enough for it to feel real or scary. The sudden turn to extreme violence at the end of the book doesn’t feel earned; it doesn’t feel like a culmination that the book has been building toward. It feels superficial and has no real weight, which is just a complaint I have about the book in general I guess. For all the speculative nature of the book, for all the weird little quirky details Langan puts in about flightless birds and experimental medical treatments and harvest rituals, this world doesn’t feel real. And at the end of the day, when you’re telling a story about a community, that’s a big, big flaw and unfortunately, this book can’t overcome it. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – Langan’s fifth novel is her first miss, an overly satirical and superficial thriller about a toxic company town; too often silly and never quite as incisive as it should be. 2 ½ stars.

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