Indika Review (Switch)

There’s a version of Indika I’d call one of the most singularly audacious narrative exploration games in recent memory, a daring title that defies easy classification with its surrealist flourishes, cinematic art direction, and cynical inversion of familiar video game mechanics. Unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch version isn’t it.

Part spiritual tragicomedy, part psychological fever-dream, developers Odd Meter deliver what is essentially a playable crisis of faith, one shackled to a deeply compromised port so crash-prone and visually mangled at times that it’s very hard to recommend in its current state, even as the story underneath it all is nothing short of compelling.

Between missing assets, localisation glitches, heavily compromised cutscene quality, and repeated crashes, this port undermines the very things that make Indika special. Indeed, you could be forgiven for wanting to brute-force your way through its five-hour runtime despite its performance issues just to see this heady, thought-provoking tale through to its conclusion.

The game puts you in control of Indika, a meek young nun eking out a bleak existence in a frigid Tsarist-era Russian convent. She’s loathed by the other sisters and treated like a workhorse. As you mundanely haul potatoes and fetch water, a sardonic disembodied voice begins to chime in, one that the game’s own marketing nudges you to interpret as the devil himself.

Whether this force — a tormentor and commentator who pries at her doubts, teasing her with sexual temptation and needling the hollowness of her performative piety — is a literal demon or simply her own intrusive thoughts is left to you to decide. In any case, Indika’s spiritual reckoning eschews shallow blasphemy for its own sake and has real philosophical heft.

The game’s writing is sharper than you might initially expect, with characters that would not be out of place in a Dostoyevsky novel pondering the uneasy nature of free will, the hierarchies of sin, and the mysteries of the human soul. Indika likewise revels in weaponising tedious gameplay as a punchline in its critique of the structures that shape belief itself.

Moment-to-moment play involves light environmental puzzles that are rarely challenging. You’ll push a safe on wheels to tilt a crumbling building so a piano slides into position beneath a window to create a path, operate machinery in a fish factory and other industrial locales, and manipulate walkways by holding the prayer button to make bridges appear or vanish.

There are also a handful of flashback sequences rendered in pixel art that function as playable memories of Indika’s life before the convent. These segments include minigame challenges that range from isometric bike racing and small platforming challenges in a 'repeat until you get the timing right' format. But the controls don’t feel intuitive and take a moment to adjust to.

These sections are the most overtly video-gamey parts of Indika, and the tonal whiplash between the colourful, retro-styled recollections and solemn 3D hyper-realism of the main campaign and its staid 'walking simulator' segments — slow back and forth traversal between a well and a crate, turning a wheezing crank with an awkward analogue rotation — are by design.

Layered on top of this is a deliberately useless skill tree that levels up shame, grief, guilt, repentance, and so on with points gained from pious things such as lighting candles to illuminate religious icons, finding relics, and dutifully completing chores. At one point, the game straight-up tells you not to bother collecting points because they’re pointless.

No one who plays Indika will rave about its gameplay, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying being in its world. As you trek between convent, village, and industrial sites, you hear snow crunch underfoot, howling wind, distant gunshots, and a woman sobbing somewhere out of sight. Interiors of abandoned peasant homes are richly detailed, illuminated in flickering candlelight.

The soundtrack is strikingly anachronistic, weaving lo-fi electronic ambience with flashes of club-tinged breakbeats and synth textures that collide with droning Orthodox chant. There are voiceovers in both British English and Russian. Playing with a Russian voiceover and English subtitles felt like the more immersive option to me, though both languages are well-performed.

That said, if you have access to another platform, play it there. Whether running on original Switch hardware or a Switch 2, this version is simply a mess. Across my playthrough, I experienced four hard crashes that would sometimes dump me back at the start of a level, and the game often reloaded in a broken state where your companion character and their dialogue would fail to spawn, leaving only their subtitles on screen. [Note. The crashes occurred while testing on Switch 2, so this may be down to specific backwards compatibility errors; other issues encountered were similar on Switch OLED and Switch 2.]

There were also sections where subtitles failed to show up entirely. Scenes that previously featured music would reload in total silence while NPCs continued to dance. Between transitions from gameplay to cutscenes, the screen would consistently flash odd glitch frames for a split second; this was not intentional stylisation but a persistent artifacting error.

Visually, the Switch version is seriously compromised, and comparing key scenes to footage from other versions is disheartening. During standard gameplay, environments are serviceable if a little soft, but the cutscenes — crucial for a game this cinematic — often look like a smudged and muddy PS2 game. There are entire visual motifs that are entirely lost on Switch.

The game pixelates shadows during a certain intimate moment in a callback to Indika’s past, but this could barely be discerned due to the poor resolution and contrast. In at least one sequence, the lighting was so dark on Switch that a major visual beat initially went unnoticed. Elsewhere, over-bright lighting makes an unsettling character close-up suffer badly.

Visuals take an even more dramatic hit in handheld mode with a significant drop in fidelity that’s hard to overlook. The handheld image is so soft and low-res that environmental details smear into indistinct muddy gradients, leaving scenes that often resemble an early-2000s game struggling under heavy post-processing.