INDIKA

INDIKA - a young nun Indica lives at a monastery in alternative Russia of the 19th century, where power is based on fear, and the church serves as its support. A talking demon travels with her, commenting on her every doubt. The world around is gloomy and deliberately poor: gray courtyards, dirt underfoot and people who have long stopped expecting better. The game is played from a third person and is based on exploration: the monastery, factories, villages and taverns open gradually, and along the way you come across people with their own troubles. There is little dialogue, but the setting speaks for itself. Ordinary people here survive as best they can, and some meetings end not in conversation, but in a request for help. The riddles here are simple, but presented as part of the ritual: move the candles, find the desired item, walk across a narrow bridge. But conversations within the heroine take up much more space than any mechanisms. The demon companion behaves insolently and pushes the heroine to doubts, but sometimes speaks to the point. Sometimes the heroine has to choose between a vow and her own desire, and there is no correct answer. The narrative raises questions of faith and submission, and some of the scenes are deliberately uncomfortable. The duration is short, but the story does not let go long after the credits. The ending depends on how much Indica is ready to listen to herself, and not to her mentors. There are few scenes, but each one is staged in such a way as to leave an unpleasant aftertaste. For those who love short atmospheric stories with an ambiguous hero and without heroic deeds.