demagogue on 14/6/2025 at 02:35
I played Indika this week.
It was very good for what it was.
I'll probably make the same disclaimer up front I do for most good narrative games. If you're into thoughtful walking sims with surreal and gameplay elements, and this is about a nun in Civil War era Russia, if that sounds intriguing to you already, then I'm sure you'll like this. You should play it knowing nothing else going in, and it'll probably be a good experience. Then you can come back and read this. It's not that I'm giving spoilers. I just think it's best to go into these kinds of games without any preconceptions.
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Now to the review part: It's about a schizophrenic Orthodox nun that is trying to get the devil's voice out of her head, gets a lot of hate from her convent, and on one of her task that gets her out of the convent, she gets looped into an escort mission for an injured man she wants to take care of. His mission to heal himself with some divine intervention gives her a hope that she can help herself.
It's a walking sim with a healthy amount of puzzle and classic platforming.
The core game is photoreal with a dismal winter hellscape that matches the tone, but it's also got a good amount of black comedy and surreal elements. I'd call it in the magical realism genre for Civil War era Russia. There's a lot of things you can read symbolism in, and it also mixes a lot of pixel graphics elements and mini-games which fit in pretty well.
Generally I thought if you're going to do a walking sim, this is the way to do it. It has some real gameplay. It was a bit janky and could be seen as pulling you out of the world, but on the other hand the scenarios were legitimately interesting, engaging, and good puzzles you felt good to get through, and I think they tended to mesh with the symbolism of different areas. So all told I like that they did it this way as opposed to cutting them out. More generally it uses the interactivity and surreal elements (which you can really just do in a game), so it's not just like a walking movie, but being a player in that world matters. And all of the pieces did fit together to make a whole. I appreciated that. It's pretty short, and a lot of important elements it rushed a bit through compared, I guess, to a novel, although probably most movies rush through just as much.
It's good if you're into surreal or magical realism storytelling and walking sims with some gameplay. If you're into religion or thinking through religion, well, it's not friendly to religion on the surface level, but if you look deeper into it, it cares a lot about things that religion should value like compassion and justice and gives you things to think about.
henke on 19/6/2025 at 02:36
Yeah I wanna play that Indika at some point.
I replayed GTA 3 (Definitive Edition on PS5) over last weekend, then kept playing after the credits rolled looking for the last side missions and hidden packages. Can't believe I still found this game so compelling. The vehicle handling and exploration are still fun. I have 2 main takeaways from my re-visit to Liberty City:
#1
One of the things that makes the city in GTA 3 more fun and interesting than games like Mafia is quite simply... Stuff. Content! Nearly every city block contains something to find if you snoop around. Side missions, rampages, weapons, or the holy grail of Stuff To Find: body armor. Body armor is THE most useful thing you can get in GTA 3 and instead of making it an unlock or purchase, the devs decided to just hide them around the city, making exploration very lucrative, and GTA players soon had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the nooks and crannies of the city that housed these power ups.
But just hiding wepons and minigames around the city like this is also very Video Gamey to the point where I'm kinda wondering if GTA 6 will have them, seeing the level of realism it's going for. Armor pickups DID exist in GTA5, but they were visually more subtle, not hovering with a big green aura but just lying on the ground with a sublte flash, and given that game's increased fidellity of the world and 3D assets, and more clutter lying around, they were harder to spot. I think that increased realism makes exploration less rewarding and fun, and we're losing something when we're making these games less Gamey.
#2
It's time for an Indie GTA 3! I wanna make a game like this. I mean, I'm not going to, but someone should! It feels like a game of GTA 3's scale is more and more doable for a small indie team. You might need to make shortcuts with some of the more lavish parts of the presentation, like having text boxes instead of cutscenes. But I think there could be a HUGE market for a throwback GTA 3 alike. GTA alikes are becoming more rare it seems, because the only people doing them are AAA and they're all trying to compete with Rockstar's expensive production values, but I think making it smaller, simpler, and more video gamey would actually be what a lot of people want.
PigLick on 19/6/2025 at 04:20
Surely someone has done something like that already? Although I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
I would love a private detective style gta- like (not LA Noire) where you just have casual missions and roam around and hang out in seedy bars, possibly with some overall narrative.
henke on 19/6/2025 at 06:05
Yeah it seems obvious but I can't really think of anything either. (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/) Motor Town is like a GTA 3-era clone, tho one focused exclusively on various (legal) driving jobs. And perhaps there's some GTA 3-dna in that Schedule I game which seems enormously popular? Haven't played it.
PigLick on 19/6/2025 at 06:30
Motor Town looks pretty cool, might try the demo.
EvaUnit02 on 19/6/2025 at 10:42
Quote Posted by henke
Yeah I wanna play that Indika at some point.
It's time for an Indie GTA 3! I wanna make a game like this. I mean, I'm not
going to, but someone should! It feels like a game of GTA 3's scale is more and more doable for a small indie team. You might need to make shortcuts with some of the more lavish parts of the presentation, like having text boxes instead of cutscenes. But I think there could be a HUGE market for a throwback GTA 3 alike. GTA alikes are becoming more rare it seems, because the only people doing them are AAA and they're all trying to compete with Rockstar's expensive production values, but I think making it smaller, simpler, and more video gamey would actually be what a lot of people want.
Tried Retro City Rampage and its sequel, Skakedown: Hawaii?
Nikke, Stellar Blade crossover event.
We live in times when a Korean free waifu gatcha game has by far superior writing to most Western AAA slop. Writing about high school level debate topics is better than most Western AAA slop, the quality bar is that low now. Can we please have that industry crash already?
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https://files.catbox.moe/nx3lxf.jpghenke on 21/6/2025 at 08:27
Uhhh... right.
ANYWAY
I've been playing 10S FOREVER, which is really solid arcade tennis action game.
[video=youtube;0kpp4oQ73NQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kpp4oQ73NQ[/video]
I also started playing the PS2 version of Deus Ex, I'm up until Lebedev in the 747 now. Posted my impressions in the DX subforum.
Sulphur on 21/6/2025 at 17:10
I keep reading that as IOS forever, like it's some sort of apple arcade game where the boss is always Steve Jobs, and your task is always to paddle the ball into various pithy quotes issuing from an enormous, stony 8-bit rendition of his face: 'Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.' *ka-thwack* And the letters fall like rain through the CRT grain and vanish as he leers from out the screen and volleys another set of business savvy bon mots at you.
As for what I have been playing, it's been back to Spider-Man 2. The unsung hero of the game is its subtle tactile rhythm: from swinging to gliding to biffing, there's the sense that you're playing well when you're choreographing your spideys like they're in a perpetual flow slinging themselves around cornices and corners and bouncing around wiry thugs and big lugs. Every now and then there's a horizon gilded by sunset and you're just scraping past a sill or ledge before you sling yourself out at the end of a web and whip yourself up into the sky, and the wind whistles in your ears as the city's enormous jumble is splayed out before you, glass and concrete and tarmac hugged by a burnt orange glow. I find myself going into the photo mode just to see that moment where gravity's relinquished its hold on Spidey and he's at the apex of his swing, silhouetted against the sun. It's gorgeous.
Still, the game itself ends up as merely fine. Which isn't bad, but there's simultaneously a lot happening and too little, and it feels like more focus would have helped, because all this cinematic, widescreen blockbustering hides some hollowness in its construction as a game and a story, which lies at the heart of what it's trying to say. Which isn't to say there isn't heart - there is, but it often feels like while it's in the right place, it's swept aside for more widescreen biffing because we know everyone has less than the attention span of a goldfish. It's telling that the moments that stick out more to me are the ones where there isn't a lot happening, and it's just walking through a park, or hanging out with MJ and Harry at a carnival. There's something to be said for a game that knows when to slow down, and knows why it should. Spider-Man 2 doesn't do that often enough; but when it does, I appreciate that more than most of the things I do in the game. But still: the image of a Spider-man backlit by the setting sun, frozen mid-leap against the city's jagged skyline, is something to appreciate a little, too.
WingedKagouti on 22/6/2025 at 08:11
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Still, the game itself ends up as merely
fine. Which isn't bad, but there's simultaneously a lot happening and too little, and it feels like more focus would have helped, because all this cinematic, widescreen blockbustering hides some hollowness in its construction as a game and a story, which lies at the heart of what it's trying to say.
That's kinda how I felt about Spider-Man 1 when I played it earlier this year. Solid, polished game with lots of activities, but even though it was populated with things to do it still felt empty/samey outside the story bits.
Sulphur on 22/6/2025 at 13:05
Spidey 2 is pretty much 1 but with more stuff, yeah. It's nice to play as Miles and see his side of the story, but the game hews to the same format to a fault. Thinking about it, I'd levy the same criticism at most Insomniac games I've played. They're always slick, solid, and good to play, but there's always the feeling that there isn't a lot of depth beyond what's immediately in front of you.
