Indika - title

As a publicly-acknowledged atheist who often has to defend my atheism against friends, colleagues, family, and the occasional real-life troll lurking around a natural history museum (seriously, that actually happened to me when I visited the Smithsonian in real life), I have a casual interest in theology, religious history, and apologetics. I listen to lectures on the historicity of Jesus, and debates about the origin of the universe or life, and so on. I'm thoroughly inoculated against the standard apologetics of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, watchmaker, absolute morality, and so forth. I appreciate when media is willing to engage with theological debate honestly and directly, instead of relying on the typical tropes of the incredulous skeptic (who is also often mopey, depressive, and cynical) that we see so often in TV and movies.

I don't remember exactly where I heard about Indika, but as soon as I did, I added it to my PSN wishlist and bought it when it went on sale. The elevator pitch of a game about a nun who thinks she's possessed by Satan seemed immediately interesting and entertaining. The fact that the game is actually very thoughtful and intelligent with its religious themes (rather than simply being a crass joke) only made it more appealing.

It's unclear to me if some voice-overs are the voices in Indika's head, or just an external narrator.
It often points out contradictions and hypocrisies of religious beliefs and activities, such as the futility of her labors.

Naughty nun and pious criminal

Indika is a thoroughly weird game. I would not be surprised if it ends up being the weirdest game that I play all year. It's a strange mix of walking sim, puzzle-platformer, and retro arcade. It's part Hellblade, part Edith Finch, maybe even part Sonic the Hedgehog, and very Russian.

Put simply, the protagonist, Indika, is a woman who was sent to a convent to become a nun, against her will, because of some perceived sin. She doesn't want to be there, but she's a genuinely nice and obedient person who fulfills her duties to the best of her abilities. Unfortunately for her, the "best of her abilities" isn't good enough. You see, she hears voices in her head, and sees visions of demons, that make her do and say things that are not quite appropriate, and which have earned her the severe disapproval of the other nuns.

One day, one of the nuns at the convent sends her out on an errand to deliver a letter to a monastery in a neighboring town. On the way, she encounters an escaped convict, named Ilya, who believes that God talks to him, and that he is kept alive by an explicit miracle from God. He has a gangrenous arm, but has survived with it for weeks without amputation, and without succumbing to sepsis. The 2 are an unlikely and ironic pair, a nun who thinks she is possessed by Satan, and a convict who thinks he is one of God's chosen people. They decide to accompany each other on a quest to a cathedral, where they hope a holy artifact can bless them both with a miracle -- to heal Ilya's arm, and to exorcise Indika's demonic possession.

Indika questions why God would make people broken, and give them free will, only to demand piety and obedience.

The concept is darkly humorous, and the game plays this humor up throughout. But it also uses the dichotomy of the 2 characters (and their specific predicaments) to explore the ideas of piety, morality, sin, free will, and the existence of a soul. And it does so earnestly and honestly, despite the wacky, whimsical nature of the circumstances and the actual game. The questions that the game poses could potentially have been pulled straight out of any apologetics book, or from an episode of The Atheist Experience.

Because Indika has a habit of making frequent small mistakes, which she often attributes to "sin", she is particularly interested in the idea of the moral equivalence of different sins. Specifically, can an accumulation of little sins add up to the equivalent of a larger, mortal sin like murder? And if so, how many such minor sins would one have to commit to damn themself to hell, the same as a murderer? Since Ilya sees himself as destined by God for a greater purpose, he is particularly interested in the ideas of pre-destination and free will. The 2 characters go back and forth about these topics (and others) several times throughout their journey together.

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35mm - title

December, January, and February is usually a time when I try to make a dent in my ever-growing Steam backlog. I buy lots of games on Steam sales, and then end up not playing most of them. So when I do go into the backlog, I always try to emphasize some of the shorter, indie games in the hopes that I can power through several before the big spring game releases start rolling in. This time around, I loaded up an independent Russian game from developer Sergey Noskov, which was very well-reviewed back when I bought it in 2016. Apparently, it's going to be released on PS4 soon, so this review is sort of topical. It hasn't really held up as well as I hoped it would in the almost-5 years since its release.

Ironically, this game is set during a fictional ebola pandemic that has turned Russia into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and I'm playing it during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The game was released back in 2016, long before COVID.

35mm is a hard game to classify. It's not quite a shooter. Not quite a survival game. Not quite a horror game. And not quite a walking simulator. It straddles the line between all of these sub-genres, shifting from one to the other at the drop of a hat, but without ever feeling jarring about it. There's even a few little mini-games thrown in for good measure. As such, there's plenty of variety that helps prevent this game from ever feeling stale. Regardless of whichever genre 35mm is currently residing in, its slow pace, subdued, aesthetic design, and melancholy tone remains consistent. It is this pacing and tone that defines the game much more than any one genre.

35mm straddles the line between walking sim, shooter, survival game, and horror.

We play as a mysterious protagonist travelling across a post-apocalyptic Russia, presumably to get home to see his family. He is accompanied by a travelling companion for most of the game. The history of these characters and the relationship between them are never clearly defined, which feels like its setting up for some kind of narrative twist right from the start. Nevertheless, the companion character acts as a sort of guide through the first half of the game, telling the player where to go and what to do. Unfortunately, since these characters are never very well-developed, any potential tragedy or impact of the final twist (regardless of which ending is achieved) is severely neutered.

What's the deal with the camera?

Even though I can't quite put my finger on what genre to classify 35mm, one thing that I can definitely say is that it is not a game about photography. Given that the game is named for the type of film in a camera, and the camera is featured in the game's title screen and promotional material, I would think that the camera would feature heavily in the game. But this is not the case. The camera is never necessary. It isn't used to progress the plot. It isn't used to solve puzzles. There isn't even a recap of the photos I took at the end of the game. Photographs become a major part of the game's finale, but they aren't the pictures that I took during the course of the actual game.

The camera is not utilized, despite inspiring the title of the game and being featured on the title screen.

So I'm really puzzled as to why the game is named "35mm". It kind of set my expectations a little bit higher than they probably should be. I thought I was going to get something a little bit more artsy and creative. But instead, what I got is a pretty straightforward, linear game.

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Lifeless Planet

Being someone who appreciates good science fiction and has an interest in real-life space exploration, it's easy for me to become intrigued with any game that promises to let me explore an alien world. Lifeless Planet promised to let me do just that, so it was a no-brainer Steam Summer Sale purchase for me last year, despite the mediocre critical reviews.

The basic premise of the game is that you play as a colonist sent to alien planet thought to be rich in life and habitable for humans. You wake up from cryo-sleep to find your ship has crash landed and your two crewmates are missing. Worse yet, the planet you crashed on seems to be a desolate wasteland devoid of life.

Are you even on the right planet? If so, where's all the life?

Lifeless Planet - badlands
And we're off to find our missing crew-mates and figure out why the planet is lifeless.

From here, you set off to follow the tracks of your fellow crew mates in an attempt to find them and figure out where you are. Things get complicated very early on when you find a long-abandoned Soviet village. Wherever you happen to be, the Ruskies beat you to it!

But this just opens up even more questions: how did the Russians get here? And where did they all go? The mysteries behind these questions are supposed to be the driving force behind the game.

The bulk of the game, thus consists of wandering around the various alien landscapes in search of answers. This exploration requires a moderate amount of fairly trivial platforming, and you stop occasionally solve an elementary puzzle.

Platforming is mostly comfortable and works adequately. You have a malfunctioning jet pack that allows you a small boost to elevate you to higher platforms, jump longer gaps, or soften your fall. I had some occasional problems with the character sliding off of the geometry, and there were a couple areas late in the game that required multiple jumps without stopping that were difficult to control accurately. But other than that, the challenge of the platforming was minimal. The intended route is always obvious, so there was never any question about where I was supposed to go.

Lifeless Planet - jet pack
Your jet pack allows you to clear pitfalls and jump over large obstacles.

Puzzles aren't much more of a challenge. They are almost all environmental or physics puzzles that vary from "find the key" to "put the rock in the hole" to "push the boulders". There's nothing here that a grade-schooler couldn't figure out.

The rest of the game is just a steady walk along the linear paths ...

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Big news on February 15: a meteor struck Russia at the same time that an asteroid passed within the orbit of geo-synchronous satellites.

Feb 15, 2013 - Meteor strikes Russia (color) [More]

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