‘Like taking a shovel to your brain’: dark fairytale game Indika takes aim at the Russian Orthodox church

Creative director and writer Dmitry Svetlov explains how his religious upbringing shaped this game about a nun with a rebellious streak

A young woman stands amid the labyrinthine architecture of a Russian nunnery. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the scene for one from Tomb Raider. Then the woman moves – slowly, and without the athletic gait of action hero Lara Croft. Her head is bowed, shrouded in black cloth, and her shoulders are hunched in such a way that you have to angle the camera just so to catch a glimpse of her bright, nervous eyes.

Indika, the titular protagonist of this dreamy yet eerily photorealist adventure game, cuts a “submissive” figure according to its creative director and writer, Dmitry Svetlov – and that is precisely the point. The Moscow-born developer set out to make a game about the ways, in his view, people have come to “hate themselves” while growing too used to “living in fear.”

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