Kicking off Entertainium’s Game of the Year coverage for 2024, our first award is for outstanding storytelling. This award showcases the game we believe had the strongest and most interesting narrative this year.
Winner: Indika
As a walk-’em-up and as an experience, there’s nothing quite like Indika. It’s a study of religious faith featuring a nun who is possessed by the Devil, but also the nature of good and evil, as your sidekick is a convict with a septic arm who believes that a miracle can cure him. All of it set in a 19th Century alternate steampunk Russian Empire.
Indika, the lead character, is a nun who is despised by the other nuns in her convent. She’s clumsy but also she’s pretty, and both of these seem to make all the other sisters dislike her. After being tasked to deliver a letter to a local monastery, she quickly stumbles upon a train crash which has caused the derailment of a prison transport. She finds a prison guard about to rape a woman, but interrupts him, and is saved by an injured prisoner named Ilya. Ilya’s arm is broken and infected and should really be amputated but he refuses, believing after receiving visions from God that visiting the temple of John of Damascus and receiving a blessing from the Kudets sacred relic will restore his arm to full health.
The gameplay is a mixture of walking and some light puzzles alongside a few chase scenes, a memorable one being where Indika is chased by an otherworldly huge wolf, but the conversations Indika has with Ilya as well as her inner monologue with the Devil are always interesting and entertaining, particularly thanks to the superb voice acting from the entire cast. Occasionally Indika’s temptations from the Devil will literally tear the world apart, blocking her progress until she prays sufficiently to mend it, resulting in a few platforming sections where you must alternate between praying and listening to the Devil speak his sins.
Indika makes you think about what it means to both believe in God and to not believe, and what the limits of that belief may lead to. Indika the nun wants to be good, wants to do good deeds, but often she stumbles into resolving situations in ways which leave people unhappy, with often the advice of the Devil being more practical. To cap it off the entire game is delivered so stylishly, with artistic camera angles, good music and and interstitial minigame scenes of 2D pixel art, that its brisk runtime zips by without overstaying its welcome.
–Gareth Brading
Runner up: Metaphor: ReFantazio
Metaphor is one of Atlus’ best stories to date: it includes political strife, societal issues, and plenty of character development. All enough to keep you thoroughly entertained for hours on end.
–Eduardo Reboucas
