Indika surprised me very early into the game. After the initial 20 minutes, which set up the young nun's tedious life in a Russian Orthodox monastery, the troubled heroine emerges into the outside world, tasked by her superiors with delivering a letter. Not long after that exit from isolation, you see some things that give you your first indication of the time period in which the game takes place. There are telephone poles, you run into a character with a pistol, and Indika rides on a motorized bike. Add in a decent amount of F-bombs, and it becomes clear that you're not in the 1700s.
Indika Makes You Ask: What Year Is This?
Communicating time period is uniquely difficult for nun stories. Everything in a monastery tends to look like it could have existed at any time in the past two millennia. The robes, the candles, the walls, the stained glass windows in dimly lit sanctuaries. I've never been inside a Christian monastery — though I briefly visited with some Buddhist monks for an afternoon in Cambodia — so my conception has been informed entirely by media like Pentiment, Benedetta, and The First Omen, all of which show monastic life through the centuries.
This stylistic stagnation can present certain challenges for artists attempting to tell stories in this milieu. I spoke to filmmaker Michael Mohan, who directed the Sydney Sweeney nun horror movie Immaculate, earlier this year. He told me that the filmmakers had pointedly added a scene of Sweeney's character arriving in Italy at an airport to get ahead of these questions about the time period. There's a scene near the climax of the film in which a cell phone plays a vital role, so they needed to establish that, yes, this movie is in fact taking place during the modern era.
Monasteries Are Timeless By Design
This timelessness is by design. The monastic life is designed to free up monks and nuns from the concerns of the world, allowing them to focus on deepening their connection to God through the cloistered life. Most monasteries practice a trade, and sometimes that trade requires modern technology. But generally, the space is designed to be as free from distraction as possible.
Add in that both the Catholic and Orthodox churches believe that their modern tradition is directly connected to the time of Christ through apostolic succession, and the timelessness takes on another meaning. It's a corrective to modern Protestantism which largely embraced modern tech in worship services as a way of casting a wider net, and bringing in younger people. Many Protestant churches in 2024 project song lyrics on screens at the front of the sanctuary, and often do the same for whatever scripture is read. They rarely sing music more than 20 years old, and incorporate modern instruments like electric guitars, drumkits, and keyboards. Protestant churches reflect the passage of time, and Orthodox and Catholic churches tend to lean in the other direction, attempting to build spaces that feel out of step with the mundane busyness of life.
The ordinary world Indika inhabits, which we see in the game's mundane opening hour, is designed to feel distant from the world she ventures out into as the game progresses. The monastery is ‘in the world, but not of the world’. So, when you play a game like Indika and notice that it feels like it's set in 1700 despite the telephone lines placing it in the more recent past, that's not an oversight. It's a smart bit of characterization about the religious tradition that Indika belongs to.
