Sensitive material disclaimer: Indika is a game that deals firsthand with religious trauma. It uses several graphic real-world scenarios to propel its plot forward. This essay will warn the reader before these scenarios are discussed. Sensitive material includes sexual assault and rape. If readers wish to skip over the parts of the essay that address these topics, they will be instructed to skip to a further paragraph where mention of these topics will cease. Reader discretion is advised.
The mountains blocked out any chance I had of experiencing a real thunderstorm. The purple majesties parted the clouds like the Red Sea, that’s what I told myself. Meteorologically speaking, it’s true: the decade I spent living in Montana and Colorado drastically reduced my chances of experiencing the severe storms I grew accustomed to growing up in the Midwest. I call the Chicagoland area home once again, and I’ve spent my summer longing for those storms. Tonight, one hit. I stood watch at the front door, nursing a beer. Half Acre Beer has some good stouts, but this lime lager I picked up isn’t doing it for me—like a fool, I picked up a 12-pack, and I’ve convinced myself to finish it before getting anything else. They’ve gotta get gone, and a storm is a good enough reason to drink: like my favorite Koozie says, “Might as well be drinking.” Between sips, I tempt a God I no longer believe in to deliver me a real storm. “Come on, you old bastard,” I mutter. “Hit me with everything you’ve got.” This antithetical, sad*stic spurn is probably the best descriptor I could give of my faith, or lack thereof. It’s a sentiment I see across folk music, and it’s also a sentiment I see in the heart of Odd-Meter’s Indika.
When I was 16, I saw Inside Llewyn Davis, and I found folk music. It was a far cry from my usual pop-punk, Midwest-emo, and Chicago-hardcore-influenced supply, but I felt a gravitational pull towards these ballads of old. It grew exponentially: my first rotation involved little beyond the performers featured in the Coen Brothers movie, expanding ever so slightly when The Wonder Years singer Dan Campbell launched side-project Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. Eventually, I circled back to Dave Van Ronk, the folksinger who loosely inspired the events of Inside Llewyn Davis. I say loosely here, as Llewyn Davis is an asshole, no two ways about it. Van Ronk is very much not that, being a sort of grandfatherly figure to the American folk revival of 1960’s Greenwich Village. He was kind and virtuous, a folk hero in his own right: he was one of 13 people arrested in the Stonewall riots that marked a new chapter in the gay rights movement in America.
Dave Van Ronk subscribes to a certain folk ideology that I tend to agree with. In his 2005 memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, he describes the music as “a process rather than a style,” referring to the tradition of musical inheritance in preliterate communities. Songs were passed down generationally like a game of telephone, creating as many deviations as you’d expect from such a practice. Van Ronk is, by his own admission, a “folk purist” who would argue against calling a narrative project like Aaron West folk music, but his definition rings true to the broader historical context of storytelling. We don’t often consider modern pop culture to have this type of mythic reputation, though we can see it even in the largest parts of the zeitgeist. Star Wars is rife with it. The Force Awakens is a newer telling of A New Hope, itself a reskinned version of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Folk is the means by which Springsteen tells the stories of the downtrodden working class to deliver the beautiful potential of the open road, and it’s the bizarre domino effect by which he’s at least partially responsible for 50 Shades of Grey (The Boss was My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way’s first concert).
There’s one piece of folklore that, statistically, most of us have encountered: the Bible. It’s regarded as the best-selling book of all time, and its true origins are somewhat of a mystery. The book most familiar to today’s readers is based on the Leningrad Codex, copied around the year 1,000—a millennia after its events are said to have transpired. Beyond that, things get a little harder to pin down. Thousands of years of cumulative research have informed us only that a majority of the stories in the Old Testament began as songs and stories (performed by persons unknown) that persevered until writing became widely adopted and they could be transcribed (by persons unknown). While the New Testament fairs a little better in regards to authorship, both halves of the Bible have undergone numerous revisions, translations, and canonizations.
That’s folk. It might seem brash to say that deliberation done by the most powerful heads of church in history compares closely to what New York City hippies were doing on drunken afternoons in Washington Square Park, but both are the act of doing folk: a process of passing down stories. It stands to reason—and I’ll get dangerously close to blasphemy here—that the susceptibility of folk to alteration (like in the game of telephone) may be present in the Bible as well.
Take the story of Samson from the Book of Judges: a man granted superhuman strength by God, who could slay a lion with his bare hands and defeat entire armies single-handedly. These are impossible feats that would feel more at home in a collection of folk hero stories like John Henry and Paul Bunyan than in the Bible. It isn’t entirely unreasonable that as the story of Samson was passed down orally, alterations and embellishments were made to enhance his feats—or they were misremembered entirely. Perhaps he slew a feral dog, and not a lion; over time the exaggerations grew to mythic proportions. I’ll borrow some more of Dave Van Ronk’s words to speak on this further:
“If one follows songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, one finds that lines like ‘Savory, sage, rosemary and thyme’ become ‘Miss Mary says come marry in time,’ and ‘Jordan is a hard road to travel’ becomes ‘Yearning in your heart for trouble.’ The cumulative effect is a sort of Darwinian evolution that first produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs.”
In the case of Samson, these phylogenetic branches can be observed via the stories of Heracles (or Hercules) and Gilgamesh, two other mythically strong figures from the Near East region; though it would be most fitting to call Samson and Heracles deviations of The Epic of Gilgamesh, as it predates them by at least 1,000 years. All three stories involve lion killing, devotion to Gods, and lovers that trick away the strength of the hero. There’s a school of thought that purports the cultures and religions of the Middle East as being descended entirely from Babylonian myth (Panbabylonism), and while this is largely discredited, it exists! People noted strong enough connections between these stories to ponder upon their significance. That’s folk in action—fittingly, one of my favorite Dave Van Ronk songs is his rendition of “Samson And Delilah.”
Indika is a videogame that is very much aware of the folkloric distortions present throughout the Bible. Let me walk you through the plot of the game. Indika, our titular nun, is sent from her convent to deliver a letter to a far-off monastery. Along the way, she encounters Ilya: an escaped convict with a brutally wounded and frost-bitten arm who claims to be on a mission from God. Should Ilya travel to the Temple of John of Damascus and see a holy artifact called the Kudets, God will heal his arm. Indika joins Ilya on his mission. The pair encounter and kill a feral dog attempting to maul them, before traversing through a fish factory near the temple. Here, Indika amputates Ilya’s diseased arm, fearing infection will soon kill him. Ilya takes his severed arm and sets off for the temple alone, feeling betrayed by his companion intervening in his holy mission. Indika follows. The two reunite before the Kudets, where Ilya prays for his arm to be healed.
I want to pause here. Thus far, Indika is indistinguishable from the same Near Eastern folk stories described above. Just as Samson, Heracles, and Gilgamesh kill a lion, Indika kills a feral dog—the game even goes so far as to remove the possible exaggeration of the type of beast slain. Both Ilya and Indika are devotees of God, and in the moments we see them, their lives revolve entirely around their faith. Where Delilah cut Samson’s hair, Indika amputates Ilya’s arm and severs his connection to God. Indika is a folk story. It’s a derivation of these types of tales, using similar beats and themes to communicate morals to the player.
The awareness of folkloric distortion reveals itself as we journey closer to the Temple of John of Damascus. Much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the nearer Idika and Ilya get to the temple, the stranger things become. The fish factory the two visit initially seems unassuming, but gradually the fish being processed increase in size. They grow to rival human height, then skyrocket into 100-foot behemoths. The cans the fish are shipped in become room-sized. This isn’t normal, but the game doesn’t draw attention to how odd of a sight this is. As such, playing Indika feels like playing through the events of the game after the story has been told hundreds of times over hundreds of years. Somewhere in this passage of Indika’s tale, someone exaggerated the size of the fish she encountered (just like your buddy who swears he caught one this big!). Someone embellished the ferocity of the feral dog they killed—while not itself a lion, the sheer size of the thing implies some degree of hyperbole. It looks like it should be a lion, and is probably only one telling away from becoming one.
Indika needs you to understand it as a folk story, because the tradition of folk is pivotal to understanding Indika’s crisis of faith. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of God in folk music, and how different that feels from what’s normally preached in churches. The discographies of American folk revival artists don’t sing His praises or elate Him for the sake of elation—they paint Him as a figure that just exists. The God of folk music is someone you’re told about through stories passed down through the ages, but can never truly know for yourself. This is the God that Indika believes in, or rather, is told to believe in by her convent sisters. She has never seen Him perform the miracles He is supposedly capable of; she has never had a reason to believe in Him beyond being told to do so. Indika is folk because God is folk.
Throughout Indika, the player will encounter incredibly “videogame-y” elements: pixelated tokens delivered to players upon completing holy acts such as lighting prayer candles, or main-quest update screens that inform Indika’s next objective. These elements bleed into an experience system that allows you to spec into stats like grief and shame, something hilariously out of place in the otherwise solemn tone that the game presents—but just as Indika needs you to understand it as a piece of folklore, it needs you to understand it as a game, hence the immersion breaking reminders that what you’re playing is indeed a videogame.
Without an intimate or unmediated connection with God, Indika has no means by which to evaluate her faith. Prayer doesn’t make her feel close to Him; she receives no spiritual satisfaction from it. She lost the plot of being a “good Christian,” and goes through the motions because those actions are how she can prove she is one. Indika has gamified her religious experience. By recontextualizing the world into a series of tasks that reward her with experience points, she has a metaphysical means to prove her devoutness. Indika views herself as a level eight Christian! Surely, she’s on the right track!
I didn’t grow up in a religious household, but as I got older, I started asking questions about faith that my mom didn’t feel she was equipped to answer. She decided to take us straight to the source, and we started attending a Lutheran church. I was confirmed in that denomination, took communion, sang the songs, etc. During that time of my life, I never fully developed what I felt was a connection to God. I was barely a teenager, I couldn’t begin to comprehend the divine. I partook in these sacraments purely because it’s what good Christians did. They proved they loved God by praying, so I prayed too. I compartmentalized these actions much in the same way Indika did. I, too, was a level eight Christian.
Indika takes the painstaking time to demonstrate just how dull and boring a life lived this way is. Before Indika leaves the convent, we are tasked with gathering enough water from the nearby well to fill a barrel. The player must walk—not sprint—from the barrel to the well, lower the well bucket, raise it, empty it into your own bucket, and walk it back to the barrel. This sequence can take roughly a full minute and a half, and you must do it five times. That’s almost eight agonizing minutes spent in tedious minutiae. A standard match of Rocket League takes less time than it does to fill the barrel. The player is rewarded with a measly 100 experience, which is nowhere near enough to become a level nine Christian, and we realize both how long Indika has been in the monastery and how downright boring it’s been.
I look back at the time I spent as a level eight Christian with the ire of wasted days.
When you gamify a singular task, it’s often to take away its banality. There’s little harm in attempting to bring an edge of lightheartedness to the mundane. Gamifying a life, however, is a largely more disastrous lapse. In a column for Unwinnable Monthly, Emily Price discusses the dangers of a TikTok trend encouraging the romanticization of life. “The phenomenon has a lot in common, in my opinion, with manifesting, since both share the idea that you can influence your material condition through your thoughts alone,” Price writes. By and large, Indika’s mental disposition follows a similar path. The gamification she creates is an attempt to manifest proof of her holiness. While Price’s piece serves as mostly a warning against hedonistic ignorance, the line that sticks with me the most is “Color coding tabs on my binder won’t make me more myself, it will just make me spend money.” Filling the bucket won’t make Indika a better Christian, it will just cause further toil.
Indika’s journey does not end at the Kudets. I need to issue a warning to any readers sensitive to topics of sexual assault or rape before continuing. If you would not like to read about these topics, skip the following paragraph.
Ilya prays to the Kudets, and nothing happens. His arm is not magically healed, least of all reattached. During this, the temple’s priest calls the aid of several guardsmen. Indika, in an attempt to protect Ilya the convict, pushes one of the guards, who accidentally fires off a shot that kills the priest. Ilya escapes with the Kudets in the confusion, and Indika is jailed. The prisonkeep tells Indika he will release her if she has sex with him, and she sees this as her only option. She sinks deep into a place of guilt and shame that only the Catholic church can inflict upon someone. Having had his way with her, the guard refuses to uphold his end of the deal. Indika, however, manages to escape, and learns that Ilya has sold the Kudets at a pawn shop. She prays to it, hoping to emerge from the sin-filled place her rape has left her in. Just as with Ilya, nothing happens. She opens the Kudets and finds nothing. She drops her rosary, and it shatters. The credits roll.
Creative director and writer Dmitry Svetlov spoke to The Guardian regarding Indika, saying “When you’re a 15-year-old, and you’ve believed in something for your whole life, it requires so much effort to change it. It’s like grabbing a shovel and putting it into your brain.” Indika’s final moments demonstrate this kind of unorthodox lobotomy. Her faith is shattered, much like her rosary, and it feels almost more tragic because of the gamification of it all. Her frame of mind has created a measurable amount of failure: it’s the experience that went into becoming the level eight Christian she was.
My journey in the Christian faith ends near that same 15-year-old mark. I began to question the folkloric God figure I’d only heard of as cherished friends grappled with their sexual identities. I couldn’t reckon with the notion that they awaited eternal damnation because of the people they’d love—this damnation coming from the same God we were told is loving, no less. I continued down my faith walkabout for an embarrassingly long time after, clinging to mission trips and youth groups as feel-good experiences that proved to me I was a good person. In my freshman year of college, I helped lead a youth group, and tried to shepherd other teenagers through some of life’s most troubling times. I myself fell into a deep depression spurred on by a multitude of factors beyond my faith, and it necessitated a step back from the role I’d taken. This time away let me rectify my inner turmoil, and I decided to abandon my status as a level eight Christian. I became a level one Perry instead, but the years worth of experience points gained have left their mark. It’s why during these Midwest thunderstorms, I shout to God to strike me down. Prove to me it wasn’t all in vain.
One of my favorite jokes to tell is about an atheist who encounters a bear in the woods. Before he’s mauled, he calls out to God. Time freezes and a voice booms from the heavens. God chastises the atheist for living his life in contempt, but grants him one wish. The atheist asks God to make the bear a Christian—hoping that the implicit pacifism of religion would cause the bear to rethink his appetite for man. God wills it so. Time resumes. The bear stands up, clasping its hands in prayer, saying “Dear God: please bless this meal I am about to receive.”
I’m eternally waiting for my bear to say its grace.
We never see Indika’s bear. The game ends. Credits roll and the player is meant to process her pious devastation.
Indika serves as a warning against gamifying your faith; to alert its audience that all that can come of this is trauma. It’s important to note that developer Odd-Meter’s departed morals come from a context of war and suffering: the team, in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war, emigrated away from Russia to avoid conscription. The Russian Orthodox church’s influence in these matters should not be ignored. “Priests just say you should defend your country, you should die for your homeland, and you go to heaven. It’s madness,” says Svetlov.
I count myself privileged to not have to face the same theocratic command that Indika’s developers did. Even so, my experience starkly pales in comparison to others I know directly. My best friend’s primary education was spent in a Christian school and he found a mentor in a faith leader. He spent years volunteering his time and passions to the church alongside them. When this mentor engaged in behavior the church deemed unethical, they were effectively excommunicated, and the faith my friend placed in them was ravaged parallel to their faith in God.
Indika’s rosary shatters.
I’m reminded of what I think was a Tumblr post—though I can’t be sure— about how certain breeds of Christian music seem to be engineered towards “Feeling God,” mischievously employing key changes and chord progressions to create euphoria within the listener. The more involved embark on mission trips, little more than voluntourism that confuses vacation-elation with devotion.
Indika seeks to tell us that this saintly engineering is intentional; we are encouraged to gamify our respective faiths. The descent into folkloric tradition the game embarks upon is synchronously designed, aiming to move the player into a world of wonder and whimsy. In my time away from Christianity, I’ve found peace in the therapeutic musings of Zen Buddhism. Perhaps years untold down the road, Indika will find a similar peace. The dogmatic experience points she spent years accumulating, however, will forever be a part of her. In the absence of her conviction, she must come to terms with herself. In the absence of God, she must light her own way. Dmitry Svetlov closes his interview with The Guardian by stating the following: “I believe that you really cannot love others until you learn how to love yourself.”
Indika’s rosary shatters. She has spent untold time clutching it until her hands bleed the color of sin. The open lesions will heal. The scars will remain—the weight of their influence will cast its shadow upon her soul forevermore—but the holy trumpets that herald the coming of heaven will, in time, learn to play a different tune. I’m reminded once again of a story that Dave Van Ronk unearthed for me. I leave you with these lyrics:
There ain’t no grave can hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna rise right out of the ground
Ain’t no grave can hold my body down
Perry Gottschalk is aPasteintern, thinking about games and the way they make us feel. For more feelings, follow@gottsdamnon Twitter.
