Like its nun protagonist leaving her cloistered routine to experience the outside world, Indika leaves the safe behind in search of the new. The nun simulator from Odd Meter uses the familiar foundation of what indie games have been to build a bridge to a brave future where they can be anything.
The Retro Platformer Era Of Indie Games Is Behind Us
For the first decade of the indie games scene, most developers were aiming for the same bullseye. There was only so much you could do with limited funds and a tiny team, so you got games like Braid (2008), Spelunky (2008), Castle Crashers (2008), Super Meat Boy (2010), Limbo (2010), Spelunky again (2012), Towerfall (2013), and Shovel Knight (2014). There were outliers, of course, but most of the breakthrough indies in that time were 2D platformers, often with a pixelated aesthetic that evoked the Super NES era.
Walking sims like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable looked more ’triple-A’, because they borrowed their assets from a triple-A game, each beginning life as Half-Life 2 mods. The beginnings were just as scrappy, even if the results looked r to what we expect from modern commercial video games.
Over time, the tools available to independent developers got better and it became less expensive to make fully 3D games. In 2018, Dusk, Amid Evil, and Paratopic all launched, inaugurating a new era of indie aesthetics. Instead of aping the SNES, this new generation of indie games would be looking back to '90s PC shooters and PSX games. We still get games going for the classic pixelated look, like this year's breakout platformer Animal Well. But a game like Crow Country, which is recreating the aesthetic of the original Resident Evil trilogy, is nearer and dearer to my heart as a kid who started playing games in the Y2K era.
A New Epoch Of 3D Throwbacks
Since 2018, though, we've seen more and more indie games that are just doing their own thing. Neon White and Paradise Killer embody vaporwave aesthetics, Disco Elysium looks like an oil painting, and The Rogue Prince of Persia and Goodbye, Volcano High could pass for 2D animated films. Indika is part of this trend. At first glance, it looks like a traditional narrative adventure game, though one produced at a lower budget like A Plague Tale: Innocence. But, the more you play, the more you realize that developer Odd Meter is interested in doing its own thing instead of chasing trends.
Its graphics draw on that familiar style, but add interesting game-y tweaks that showcase games do their best to iron out in favor of realism. Ellie from The Last of Us doesn't open a chest and get a big golden ring with an 8-bit-inspired sound effect, but Indika does.
Indika Combines The New And Old Indie Aesthetics
The triple-A style narrative adventuring is broken up by sections that will seem familiar to anyone who has been playing indie games since the Shovel Knight days. There's an early section, presented from an isometric perspective, where a young Indika races her father's motorbike around a pixelated track. Later on in another 16-bit flashback, Indika needs to go see a mysterious suitor on the roof of her building. To get there, she has to platform along the walls, hopping from window to window, and ledge to ledge, in gameplay reminiscent of the Sega Genesis’ Aladdin platformer.
Putting these segments in this retro graphical style is as effective as movies putting flashbacks in black-and-white. We associate pixel art with older games, so it works as a shorthand for Indika's past. Having that old-school look sit next to third-person cinematic graphics is an interesting juxtaposition, and it points to a future where indie games can use every tool at their disposal to tell their stories.
When movies like Oppenheimer or Little Women use multiple color palettes to differentiate distinct timelines, we instinctively understand. Games, though, have largely been hemmed in. Wouldn't it be cool to break those boundaries, to use whatever aesthetic or mechanic or genre works best to tell the story, to communicate the idea? And not just as minigames (Yakuza) or jokey one-offs (South Park: The Stick of Truth), but as fundamental units of the game's design, through which the team can say something interesting? Game development rules say you can be Uncharted or you can be SteamWorld Dig, but you can't be both. You can look like a triple-A game or an indie, but you can't look like both. Indika is the rare game asking 'Why not?'
