Virtual Salvation

A meditation on Indika and the theology of video games.

The first major task you undertake in Indika—a third-person, puzzle-based, narrative video game—is to tediously fill a water basin from a well, bucket by bucket. Walk over, lower the bucket, raise the bucket, walk to the basin, pour the water out, repeat. The story then follows a young nun living in a snowy monastery in a remote, fantastical version of late 19th-century Russia. The titular heroine is either possessed by the devil or mentally ill—plagued by persistent intrusive thoughts that alarm the other sisters, who all come to see her as cursed, and despise her.

After being sent from the monastery to deliver a letter in a nearby town, Indika encounters Ilya, an escaped convict who is on his way to find the “kudets,” a holy artifact, believing that God told him to find this relic in order to heal his severely wounded, gangrenous arm. On their travels, Indika eventually reads the letter she was sent to deliver, which turns out to be her expulsion from the monastery. The two become friends and make their way across Russia in search of the holy artifact, discussing existential questions—Indika ironically playing the perpetual voice of doubt against the hardened criminal’s firm religious beliefs.

Indika captures something about the bizarrely commensurate relationship between video games and theology. Both ultimately concern the relationship between “true” and illusory realities, and their creators. In ludology—game studies—the created world is often referred to as “the magic circle,” a space delimited for a game which operates in accordance with its own set of rules and values. As a rebellious child of the Catholic school system, this is more or less how I understood religion to operate—with the exception that it laid claim over the totality of space for the entirety of our lives, and an eternity beyond them.

Game worlds are products of intelligent design, and thus serve as a natural analog to Christianity. This parity is more evident in video games than in other artistic mediums, as participants in these virtual worlds inhabit them in a way far closer to our lived realities. Although games are curated experiences, a player generally has far more agency in their virtual inhabitation than audiences when they are being jerked around or held in place by a director, author or painter. Choice is at the heart of the ludic experience, as are questions as to whether or not the player’s agency is merely notional. Video games thus invite the same kind of existential questions that have become deeply integrated into the cultural religious experience since modernity. Even as a youth, while ostensibly rejecting religion, I always chose clerics and priests in RPGs. Within these “magic circles,” prayer invoked the direct intercession of divine justice, leaving no room for doubt. Here, God was power, God was vengeance, and I was the ultimate zealot. Only later would I come to understand the critical importance that doubt plays in genuine faith and meaningful agency.

While the history of video games abounds in analogies between the player or developer and God, games are simultaneously the genre which has maintained the furthest distance from any actual religious influence. Religious games have always existed, but they’ve been relegated to a niche experience that the average gamer wouldn’t ordinarily encounter. There are a variety of reasons for this: The early dominance of Japan in the industry; the fact that modern video games didn’t become popular until the 1980s, when secularization was in full swing. But whatever the reason, earnestly religious video games are mostly known in popular culture through derision in meme culture—one unforgettable example being Zoo Race The Game, which asks the daring question: What might it have been like if Noah hosted Mario Kart style animal races with the creatures he collected to repopulate the planet?

This extreme lack of religious sincerity in gaming has also meant a lack of popular interrogations of religious ideas in popular games. The saying goes that all J-RPGs begin with rescuing a cat and end with killing god—but the “god” in question almost always has a distinct sci-fi flair. This is the first refreshing thing about Odd Meter’s Indika: It’s unapologetic efforts to address religious and existential questions of the precise type we tend to find in mature art forms, explored without naivety or ignorance. Odd Meter and its lead designer, Dmitry Svetlov, have undoubtedly accomplished their goal to “show that games are art no worse than Bergman and Tarkovsky."

As a self-critical gamer, sentenced to life exploring this medium, I’ve developed a certain disdain for developers who use their projects as surrogates for films. I’m a rarity among my peers in my contempt for auteur game designer Hideo Kojima’s cut-scene-laden, star-studded, dialogue-heavy “games” and have uttered the phrase “just make a film, bro” more than once. I am so obnoxiously attached to the avant-garde "medium specificity" perspective that, when I am recommended a game, my first question is, “How long before it actually starts?” If the answer is longer than five minutes, I usually pass.

Indika, however, is a rare example that showcases precisely why my prejudice can’t be made into some universal dogmatic philosophy. Indika is as much about video games as it is about God: It is fully aware of the “parity” I spoke of earlier, and explores this allegory from start to finish. Does it do so in favor of presenting an experience sympathetic to Christianity? The answer is a resolute no: This is a profoundly sacrilegious game, that is highly critical of the Russian Orthodox Church I belong to, and organized religion as a whole. However, the sincerity and seriousness with which it treats the topic is something to be celebrated, and the ambiguity with which the game explores religious ideas until its final moments creates ample space for it to offer something original and substantive about the intersection of virtual and spiritual progress.

Aside from its unrelenting and serious examination of theological doubt, Indika is also heavily Dostoevsky-coded in the way it frames these questions in the guise of a popular genre—instead of a detective story, we have all the trappings of an adventure RPG. If we were to limit our analysis solely to Indika’s narrative arc, this is a travel story with elements reminiscent of a hagiographic pilgrimage text with no small dose of skazka, Russia’s idiosyncratic brand of fairytale. On first glance, the Russia the story takes place in looks extremely familiar—one of the game’s strengths is its exemplary graphic fidelity which makes it look better than many AAA titles, despite its indie budget. Having visited many such snowy, isolated monasteries in Russia, the game captures the vibe well. Indika herself looks so good that we easily pass through the uncanny valley and into a perspicacious realism. The life-like characters and landscapes are only then made stranger and stranger as the game progresses and the player begins to notice bizarre abstractions—giant animals, impossible Escheresque architecture, imagined steam-punk technologies—yet all of these are placed in the game world with such quiet assurance that the player experiences cognitive dissonance: Are these things are somehow as normal as the game world insists they are? As the story progresses, however, there are certain moments that totally dispense with any semblance of realism, such as a particular puzzle which requires you to operate a giant crane to move full-sized bridges to complete a pathway.

There is a general rule in game design that you put your best foot forward first: A perfect example is 2024s breakout hit action game Black Myth Wukong, which starts with the player experiencing a taste of the endgame power they have to look forward to—just before it is taken away, forcing the player slowly regain it bit by bit throughout the game. Contrast this with the Sisyphean act of repeatedly filling a bucket with water. Here, in conventional video game style, each rep is rewarded with a giant flashing fraction—“x/5”—to inform you of your progress. There is a giant score meter ever-present in the top left hand corner of the screen like some kind of late-80s arcade game. The juxtaposition between the bleak, lifelike graphics and that glowing green score meter is perpetually uncanny.

In addition to earning points for your in-game activities, Indika also includes an RPG style “leveling” system, where points can be invested into different implicitly Christian values such as shame, grief and piety. However, before the player can get excited about speccing into a grief build, the game makes it clear on a splash screen that both the points and levels are entirely meaningless. When you look at what boons the choices in the leveling tree afford you, they amount to nothing more than a chance to get more points immediately, or to get extra points every time you earn more points in the future… which is difficult to get excited about when you realize that the only thing these points can be used for is to gain more meaningless levels.

The story's extremely bleak climax begins when Indika and Ilya reach the town where the kudets is located. A priest tells the pair that they are too late and will have to try to catch it in the next town, despite the relic being in the next room over, and then attempts to turn them in to the police. A soldier arrives and shoots at Ilya, but hits the priest instead when Indika pushes Ilya out of the way. Ilya escapes with the kudets, and when Indika finds him later, drunken and sullen, he tells her that he pawned the holy relic in exchange for a trumpet he can’t even play.

Indika eventually gets her hands on the relic from the pawnbroker, at which point the player is granted access to its miraculous power: It is hollow inside, but you can shake it for limitless, meaningless points by mashing a button. Ilya’s prayers for his arm to heal go unanswered. The point is clear: The magical mcguffin that inspired this entire adventure is completely useless, and all the energy and effort expended to reach it has been nothing but an exercise in futility.

Too often in video games there is a gap between the narrative and ludic elements—the player is generally either increasing their skill or leveling to improve their power for a cathartic reward, regardless of the storyline. I can think of no other game that ends by telling the player that its systems have no value, intentionally leaving them in a state of confusion and despair. Despite much being left open-ended throughout the game, Indika chooses the Dostoyevskian strategy of ending with a pointed certainty that upends the ambiguity at the center of the experience—but it’s the opposite conclusion of the one notoriously chosen by Dostoevsky at the ending of Crime and Punishment, wherein Raskolnikov comes to God in Siberia and finds peace with himself. Dostoevsky’s choice is still seen in the West as an aesthetic failing that undermines the element of his writing that Western scholars are interested in, i.e. in taking his doubts and questions as ends in themselves, presenting the writer as an atheist, existentialist thinker alongside Camus and Sartre.

Do we then conclude that Indika, while offering some value in the execution and its capacity to ask important questions in an unusually compelling way, ultimately surrenders to the cultural values of its time, and thus should not be considered a “religious” game at all? Svetlov alleges he has received death threats for his heinous depiction of Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the game presents an earnest assessment of the religious doubt invoked by challenging times, one that tells the story of two people who maintain a flame of faith in their own ways, through overwhelming pain and numerous obstacles. The tradition of apophatic theology attempts to understand God through determinate negation, by peeling off the layers of the world and our consciousness one by one, until we find ourselves “in a place of pure darkness, with no light from the burning maps of the world." There is something akin to this in Indika’s exploration of radical doubt.

That said, there is positive content here as well—despite the demons Indika wrestles with throughout her journey, it is impossible not to take note of the care and reverence with which she lights a candle or prays before an icon, even after being defrocked. The game designers' attention to detail and effort also betray a certain respect: Each icon is gorgeously rendered, the spaces where believers once lived are true to life and earnest. Who is to say that people of faith can’t approach a work of art like this one in much the same way the “existentialist” interpreters of Dostoevsky did, rejecting the author’s conclusion while recognizing the truths and value of the work as a whole? In sincerely wrestling with these topics, Indika leaves more room for what it ultimately rejects than almost anything else available to us in the modern video game industry. If video games can be redeemed and made into art, perhaps something could be made of us sinners as well.