Indika on PS5: Great story, great graphics, stupid puzzles

I enjoy a good puzzle game every now and then especially if it is accompanied by an unusual story and some decent graphics. Throw in some religious sort of aspect into it and well, now you kind of really have me on the hook.

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Indika appeared to be something that I would really enjoy because it is dark, it has a sort of real-world good vs. evil aspect to it and it dives into mental aspects of madness in a way that it close enough to real life that I find it really intriguing.

You play the role of a nun named Indika (imagine that?) that wishes to completely devote herself to the spiritual life but internal politics of her monastery or nunnery or whatever the heck those things are called prevent her from being respected by the people that can make this a reality for her. She is abused by her fellow nuns and is treated like a prisoner until one day, for some reason that is explained in a truly wonderful way while also showing the opening credits.

This game really has a lot going for it and at the start I was feeling as though I was in for a really wild ride.

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The game is dark and spooky even though at least as much of it that I have played, nothing is really chasing you. There are no demons to fight off with your nun powers and each progression is normally just a question of finding the right switch or the correct thing to crawl over in order to advance from one section to the next.

And this is where the game kind of loses me.

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it doesn't take long, because the very first puzzle that you encounter was a pain in the ass but where I truly got frustrated is this one, where you arrive at the top of a platform and there is a safe there. You can move the safe and it will shift the building that you are standing on. You can also crawl on top of the safe so your natural instinct, especially since you are really early on in the game, is that you have to push this safe somewhere in order to reach a higher area that is just beyond your reach.

But that is not at all what you have to do. The shifting of the upper platform opens up a window that is two stories below you and was just completely nondescript and uneventful-looking as you walked past it on your way up to this point. I was about to just shut down the game and play something else because I don't particularly care for puzzles that are this cryptic and senselessly difficult.

Unfortunately, the puzzles like this continue to get more and more obtuse as time goes on and eventually, every single room you find yourself in becomes an exercise in "ok, what minor fucking thing did I overlook while walking past it?"

This isn't fun, this is tedious. And that is a shame because the story, the voice acting, the surroundings and the teensy bit of madness that you start to encounter as the game goes on is actually really good.

For me, I ended up getting to a lot of points where i am just bamboozled about what TF I am supposed to do next to the point where I feel as though the only way I could enjoy this game would be to have a YouTube walkthrough open on a computer next to where I am playing. and I really don't want to do that.

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one thing I really enjoy about the game is how Indika will have hallucinations of a retro gaming sort throughout her travels and they build this into the game. In fact, this is how the game starts with some sort of thing falling through stars that you collect before the real game even begins. It's just kind of cool and keeps you on your toes about that is going to happen next.

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Unfortunately, most of my experience has been of me being trapped in some sort of area or room and needing to search every single corner and cranny in order to discover something like a ladder that I have to move to a very specific point in the map in order to climb over a wall that doesn't even appear to be climbable or of any sort of significance at all. Then once you get over that wall you enter another trapped state where you do it all again.

This is a shame because other than the very tedious puzzles I am quite enamored with this game and appreciate its ingenuity and unique aspects.

I don't see myself finishing this game because wandering around and looking in all the corners and moving a switch and not being given any real indication as to what it actually did only to have to backtrack to some previous location and see that it opened a window that was never pointed out to me, is not what I consider fun.

I also do not want to have to fire up a tutorial every single time I get a little bit stuck, which is what I would imagine most people have done that have completed this game.

Maybe I am being fussy here or maybe I am just not very smart. I enjoy puzzles in a game but not things that remind me of how maddeningly difficult thingsl ike MYST were back in the early days of gaming.

I may just watch the videos of someone else playing the game so I can see all of the story because spending half an hour looking for a ladder in an abandoned and snow-covered village is not my idea of a good time.

I'll give it another day, or another hour of gameplay but then I'm afraid if have too many games in my backlog to spend on something that irritates me.