2024 is the year for many big releaseand I’ve played a lot of them, which means more games will inevitably be left out. In a busy year for game releases, it’s rare that I get the chance to play a game just months after its release, and even rarer that I fall in love with it. But that’s exactly what happened when I started playing the game showa third-person adventure game, released in May. Now, I can’t believe I waited so long to experience it. show is one of the most engrossing releases of the year, blending friction-laden gameplay with a narrative that dissects religious trauma.
The first major task the player takes on is show A large bucket is being filled with water. In a 19th-century Russian monastery, the titular protagonist Indika is one of many nuns, a job that means carrying only a small bucket back and forth between the barrel and the well to complete the task. It takes you five trips to fill the bucket, when one of your superiors casually walks by and intentionally knocks it over, emptying the bucket of your labor. You might be asking yourself, “So what’s the point of filling the bucket?” And here’s the best part! It makes no sense, and is just the beginning of the frustrations you and Indika will have to deal with during this approximately five hour journey.
Everyone at the Indika convent seemed to hate the young nun for no apparent reason. A quiet and overly worried follower of her faith, she is haunted by a voice in her head and she believes the devil is constantly punishing her for every perceived sinful thought and action. One day Indika was asked to deliver a letter to a distant church far away from the monastery. Is this an important task given to her, or is it just another pointless busy job that the other nuns expect Indika to never return? Well, that’s up to you.
During this journey, Indika needs to travel through the increasingly repressive regions of snow-covered Russia. She meets a few people along the way who all behave badly towards her and the rest of the world. Sometimes you’ll encounter environmental puzzles that require you to push crates and crawl through space. When the constant voices in Indika’s head become overwhelming, her world begins to crumble, requiring you to press a button and pray for the distorting changes to go away. It leads to some engaging platforming puzzles in which you’ll intermittently pray to switch between the broken and normal worlds to get where you need to go.
one of the most interesting things show What it does is go from the highly realistic modern graphics used by most games to a retro 16-bit pixel style. These sections are flashbacks to Indika’s life before she became a nun, and are beautifully poignant moments of true emotional depth. You can also collect points throughout the game, which give you seemingly useless upgrades like Shame and Guilt, which in turn just give you more points in a skill tree that seems to go nowhere. More points. Both of these art choices are reminiscent of the arcade game era, being about gaining points but not actually giving you a victory status, which mirrors the protagonist’s experience at the church.
showThe painful journey in the shadow of religion is not subtle. It’s clear that the game views the religious trauma Indika experiences as the meaningless result of a failed religious system. However, its excellent execution makes it a very worthwhile experience. Stories that involve unique experiences of femininity and religious institutions have endless appeal.
play show Let me keep thinking back to 2023 Mercy Records: Volume Oneanother wonderful narrative game that focuses on the complex emotions associated with religion, which serves as both a prison and an escape for women (go play it mercy). At the end of the day, Indika is just a broken woman looking for something to save her, and the religious establishment takes advantage of that vulnerability and only makes it worse. If you want to play something different this year, you absolutely need to play show.
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