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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ac7ac3f5-e828-4231-8861-40555c5d8022|2|5.0
Tags:Indika, Odd Meter, 11-bit studio, puzzle, religion, nun, monastery, guilt, devil, demon, mental illness, morality, free will, soul, Russia
I feel like Halloween just wouldn't be Halloween anymore without playing some new P.T.-inspired indie horror game. This year's "hot" title seemed to be MADiSON by Bloodious Games, which I started playing with a group of 2 friends on Halloween night (after returning from taking the kids Trick or Treating), but we didn't get around to finishing until after the New Year. It wasn't that we didn't want to keep playing. Quite the opposite, in fact. The reason it took so long to finish is because all 3 of us really wanted to keep playing, so I had to wait till all 3 of us were available for a next session before continuing.
In addition to being another indie horror game in a long line of P.T. wannabes, MADiSON also follows in closely off the coattails of Visage. Both games heavily utilize a polaroid flash camera as a critical multi-tool, but MADiSON does one-up Visage by making the camera much more integral to core gameplay. While I only remember the camera in Visage being used as a source of temporary illumination, the camera of MADiSON is both integral to the story, and also absolutely necessary for solving multiple puzzles and for progressing the game's story.
Yet another indie horror game about wandering the halls of a haunted house -- this time with a camera!
Ocular Obscura
The core gimmick of MADiSON is that the player uses a polaroid camera to take pictures of the environment, and the resulting photograph will show things that aren't really there. These photographs will be used as clues to solve a puzzle or to progress the scenario, or taking the picture will just outright trigger the next objective. The house is littered with such puzzles. Unfortunately, the layout of the house, the pacing of the scenario, and the solutions to many puzzles can be a bit on the obtuse side. So much so, in fact, that Bloodious Games resorted to scattering blank polaroids near important objects, which act as obvious signposts that you should take a picture of the thing. This isn't exactly obvious at first, because many such marked objects will get no reaction from the camera until later parts of the scenario, when they become relevant to the current task at hand.
The dense nature of the game's map creates a lot of problems for pacing and signposting. Multiple puzzles, from different chapters of the game, might be present in the same space and could serve to interfere with one another or confuse the player.
This isn't to say that the puzzles are necessarily "bad". Once we realized that the house is littered with red herrings that don't become relevant until later, I actually started to like that these puzzles are a bit more complicated and multi-layered than the typical adventure game fare the we've been getting over the past decade or so. This was, in fact, a big reason why all 3 of us wanted to continue playing the game: we wanted to solve the next puzzle! So many adventure and horror puzzles these days don't get much more complicated than "open a drawer, find a key, and use said key on the one and only lock in that same room." They can feel so patronizing. MADiSON's puzzles definitely do not feel patronizing!
Many puzzles require careful observation and inferences from the environment.
Even if there is a simple clue like a color or a number that is given to the player, there is always some confounding additional factor. It's never just as simple as matching a number or a color or a shape. Most of these puzzles require some careful observation of the player's surroundings, some contextual inferences that won't be obvious to every player, and occasionally a lit bit of arithmetic, spatial, or logic skills. Playing this game in a group actually did help in this regard. Any one of us would have been stuck for a while on multiple puzzles, but there was always one of us who would pick up on a given clue and point it out to the others.
But some of the early puzzles, in particular, are a bit heavy on the red herrings and could definitely have used some better sign-posting and direction.
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49704781-82c7-44a0-b8aa-67e4cff81352|1|5.0
Tags:Madison, Bloodious Games, indie gaming, horror, psychological horror, camera, demon, possession, occult, ritual, inventory, walking simulator, PS5
I was going through the comments on my posts a while back, and I came across a doozy of a comment by user Maiden T. I'm not going to replicate the entire post here, but you can review the comment at the link provided. In summary, the commenter asserts that Silent Hill, as a series, was never about occultism, and that all the games were "repressed-memory morality tales". The first Silent Hill and "to an extent the third one" are the exceptions (according to Maiden T).
Totally unrelated image of a demon god...
My mind just about exploded when I read this comment, and I started typing up a response, only to realize that I had written a whole blog's worth of counter argument. So, I decided to just turn it into a new blog. I'll continue my series of analysis and interpretation articles about Silent Hill with a write-up about how the series is most definitely about occultism.
What is Silent Hill about?
I've already tackled two topics that I consider to be common myths about Silent Hill. The first was about the over-sexualization of Pyramid Head, and the second was about the realness of the Otherworld. Now I'll address one of the most fundamental misunderstandings about the series: what is it about?
The repressed-inner-demon myth
Probably the most core and fundamental myth about the Silent Hill series is the continued propagation of the idea that the series (as a whole) is about characters dealing with repressed inner demons - typically a repressed memory of guilt over a perceived sin which they have committed. This idea is rooted in the popularity of Silent Hill 2. It is so pervasive, that the designers and producers of newer installments of the series embrace it, while dismissing the other critical elements of the other games' stories:
"[My favorite SH game is] Silent Hill 2. I didn’t really care for all the heavy occult based storyline in SH1 and 3. I felt SH2 had the best stand alone storyline, and provided the best atmosphere of all the SH games by far.
[...]
I find all the in’s and out’s of ‘The Order’ to be overly intricate and rather uninteresting, but that’s just my opinion."
- Devin Shatsky (producer, Shattered Memories, Downpour), in an interview with Hell's Descent (Nov 5, 2010).
The reason that Silent Hill 2's design was so successful (and unique within the series) is because SH2's excellent atmosphere was based around feelings of melancholy and depression rather than fear and threat.
Exploring a character's personal guilt and depression works great when the entire game is designed around that central, unifying theme! It doesn't work quite so well when ... [More]
04f88e94-11ac-43f4-beb3-1cd282060bf0|19|4.1
Tags:Silent Hill, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill 4: the Room, Silent Hill Origins, Silent Hill Homecoming, Silent Hill Downpour, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, Team Silent, Konami, cult, occult, fan fiction, horror, Harry Mason, Alessa, Dahlia Gillespie, Cheryl Mason, Heather Mason, James Sunderland, Red Pyramid Thing, Pyramid Head, Claudia Wolf, Vincent Smith, Henry Townshend, Walter Sullivan, Travis Grady, Alex Shepherd, Shepherd's Glen, Murphy Pendleton, ritual, Flauros, demon, god, Mary Shepherd-Sunderland
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