How Indika turns contradiction into player UX

Introducing PX Contrast: a design approach where opposing experiences reinforce the same emotional idea.

Contrast is one of the most familiar visual tools for guiding attention in design. But in Indika it becomes a game UX tool. It shapes how players interpret the story. Released in 2024 by Odd Meter, the game won Best Narrative at the Games for Change Awards 2025 for its unconventional storytelling.

I first played Indika on release, and one thing kept bothering me: why do different parts of the experience look like they belong to completely different games? Its gameplay, sound, progression, and UI constantly pull against player expectations, yet together they express the same emotional conflict.

I call this approach Player Experience Contrast (PX Contrast): a sustained state where contradictory player experiences coexist without resolution.

A nun, a Devil, and a World that Stops Making Sense

You play as Indika, a young Orthodox nun who moves from complete obedience to rejecting her faith entirely. She carries the Devil with her, quite literally, inside her head, as she searches for identity outside the monastery walls. He whispers things Indika would never dare to say out loud, and raises questions she initially experiences as sinful. As the game progresses, the line between his voice and her own becomes increasingly blurred.

That internal split shows up in the world around her, too. At first, Indika feels surprisingly grounded. The game opens in a monastery that looks entirely believable. Growing up in Russia, I immediately recognized the monastery’s visual language, and that familiarity made the later transformation of the world feel even more unsettling.

As the game progresses, that realism breaks down the same way Indika’s certainty does. Historical accuracy gives way to dream logic: a cow the size of a barn, steam-powered machinery, ginormous bells, and many other bizarre things. The further you go, the less “real” the world becomes and the less sure Indika is of what she believes.

The world she discovers can only be described as a wild combination of comedy and tragedy straight out of the novels by Dostoyevski and Bulhakov.— From the game’s official Steam page

That description captures the game’s tone remarkably well. It swings constantly between dark comedy and genuine dread, wrapping its story in symbolism and dream logic. Even the name “Indika” feels deliberate. Its resemblance to Cannabis indica adds another possible layer of meaning, especially given the game’s recurring themes of altered perception and reality.

That symbolism also reflects creator Dmitry Svetlov’s own experience. In an interview with The Guardian, he described growing up religious before becoming an atheist. Rather than criticizing faith itself, the game explores the broader system of beliefs and values that shapes a person’s identity.

Like any strong symbolic work, it invites multiple interpretations. What follows is my reading of the game and the role I believe its game UX design plays in supporting it.

Defining PX Contrast: Three Conditions for Meaningful Contradiction

PX Contrast builds on existing discussions of contrast in game UX (e.g., Salama’s Affinity vs Contrast framework), but extends the concept beyond momentary friction or immersion-breaking elements that pull players out of the experience.

PX Contrast is a deliberate layering of conflicting player experiences that coexist without resolution, allowing players to hold multiple interpretations of the same interaction simultaneously.

The term contrast here does not simply mean visual difference or opposing elements placed next to each other. In PX Contrast, the difference between systems creates a contradiction in how the player interprets the experience. Contrast creates the separation; contradiction creates the tension.

PX Contrast works when three conditions are met:

Two or more systems (interface, sound, pacing, progression, environment, and others) create different interpretations of the same experience, allowing contrasting meanings to coexist.
The contrast between these elements serves the same underlying theme, rather than existing as a purely aesthetic or mechanical choice.
The contrast is intentional. It is a deliberate design choice that supports the player’s interpretation, rather than an unresolved inconsistency.

PX Contrast vs. Ludonarrative Dissonance

The other closely related term is ludonarrative dissonance, coined by Clint Hocking in 2007, describing moments when a game’s story and its mechanics pull in different directions. Since then, some designers and critics have started treating it as a deliberate tool rather than something to avoid. Connor Jackson, for instance, has argued for moving away from Hocking’s framing of the concept as a flaw, toward seeing it as a meaningful expressive device.

Dissonance describes the player’s feeling of mismatch, while PX Contrast describes the design structure that creates that tension. Not just gameplay versus narrative, but interface, sound, pacing, progression, and environment all contributing to the same emotional tension.

How Indika Turns Contradiction Into Player Experience Design

In Indika, the player and the game character share the same fractured perception: sacred rituals and gamified actions, slow reality and fast memories, distorted and normal worlds. Neither interpretation of each contradiction wins. Both remain active, creating a sustained tension that mirrors Indika’s inability to resolve her faith.

Indika is a clear case study of all three PX Contrast conditions working together at once. Its interface, pacing, and sound each pull against player expectations in their own way, yet none of them contradict the story. All communicate the same emotional idea through different channels.

The pixel-art UI, the contrast between slow movement and fast-paced memories, and the shift from sacred chants to playful retro sound effects all challenge player expectations while gradually teaching players to see the world through Indika’s fractured perspective.

1. The Interface: Turning Faith Into Feedback

What also caught my attention was how the interface itself became part of the storytelling and how it shaped the way I experienced the main character’s journey. Rather than supporting the fiction of the world, it creates distance from it, aligning the player’s perspective with Indika’s own experience.

The interface gradually reshapes player expectations: actions that should feel sacred are reframed as ordinary gameplay interactions. That mirrors Indika’s own emotional detachment from her faith (she “plays” rather than truly believes). Religious rituals have stopped meaning anything. They’re just points in a mind game now. The interface teaches players to hold sacred and gamified readings at once without choosing.

This interpretation is also reflected in Svetlov’s own words:

The Game became a very important metaphor for our story. The game we all play, according to rules we didn’t make up, waiting for the reward that’s destined for us in case of “victory,” and living in fear of punishment in case of “defeat.”— Dmitry Svetlov for Game Developer

One question the game raises from a design perspective is whether this spacial UI elements appearing near the character is deliberately non-diegetic (visible only to the player, not part of the game world), or whether Indika can actually perceive these game interface elements as part of her own mental reality.

I don’t think the game provides a definitive answer, and that’s what makes the question so interesting. Both interpretations contribute to PX Contrast, expanding the storytelling through intentional design.

If the UI exists only for the player, it creates distance between the player and the world.
If Indika can see it too, the interface becomes another expression of her fractured perception, extending the idea that the world we experience is shaped by her state of mind.

The game’s mechanics contradict the meaning these rituals appear to have within the world. Lighting candles and praying are not presented as moments of spiritual reflection, but as actions that generate points and rewards.

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Normally, this gap between gameplay and narrative would be considered a design inconsistency. Here, the inconsistency becomes intentional feedback about the character’s internal conflict.

2. Sound: When a Prayer Sounds Like a Reward

Sound in Indika runs on the same contrast logic as the UI, and it’s easiest to see when you break it into a sequence:

What the player does
What they expect to hear
What they actually hear
What that mismatch makes them feel

Indika lights a candle and prays. The action carries the weight of a real religious ritual, so the player naturally expects silence, reverence, or something restrained. Instead, the game answers with a bright, cheerful retro chime. The kind of sound that says “you did it” in Duolingo, not “you were heard” in a church.

The brain reads it as a small reward, a completed task. That reading collides directly with the religious meaning of the action itself, and the player is left holding both interpretations at once. It’s the same dissonance Indika feels toward her own faith: the gesture is still performed, but the meaning behind it has quietly drained away.

Instead of reinforcing the atmosphere traditionally, the sound design creates intentional friction between action feedback and emotional context. Sacred and unsettling sounds exist alongside cheerful game-like effects and UI, forcing the player to question how these elements can belong to the same experience.

3. Pacing: Slow Devotion vs. Fast Memory

In the “real” game world, movement is slow and heavy. One of the first tasks, carrying buckets of water, takes real time and effort, which reinforces just how monotonous monastic life is.

The platformer sections inside Indika’s memories are the opposite: fast, reactive, and sometimes genuinely tense. That tonal shift in pacing is another strand of the same contrast running through the whole game.

In the racing section the explicit control prompts make the contrast even stronger: the game openly reveals its own rules instead of hiding the mechanics behind the world.

As the Devil’s influence grows, his voice becomes more persistent and the boundary between realities begins to collapse. The screen floods with red, the music intensifies, and his voice merges with distorted sounds, overwhelming Indika’s own presence. Then a short prayer pulls her back into “normal” reality: the colors return, the Devil’s voice disappears, but a low, muffled sound remains underneath.

Switching between these states turns contrast into a gameplay system: players learn to interpret changes in visuals, sound, and control as signals of Indika’s mental state.

4. The illusion of Progression

Like the rest of Indika’s design, the progression system borrows the visual and sound design of retro games while quietly questioning the meaning behind it.

Mechanically, the player interacts with a familiar progression system: unlocking perks in a skill tree and collecting points. But all this progression exists only to generate more faith points. It becomes a reward loop without meaningful progression, exposing the emptiness behind the system. The accumulation of points feels as hollow as the rituals that produce them.

This idea reaches its peak at the end of the game: after everything Indika goes through, she finally receives an endless amount of points while trying to fulfill her wish. Yet the reward she spent the entire game chasing turns out to be completely meaningless.

Ironically, the faith points matter not because of what they unlock, but because of what they never do. Their mechanical emptiness mirrors the emotional emptiness Indika feels toward rituals she can no longer truly believe in.

And although technically it doesn’t change anything, all players continue to collect these points, including the developers. I think it can be viewed as a small social experiment.— Dmitry Svetlov for Game Developer

5. Environment: From Order to Ruin

The contrast in Indika extends beyond individual mechanics into environmental storytelling. The game begins in a clean, organized monastery. Its architecture creates order and stability. By the end, this image is completely reversed: the player arrives in a broken and distorted landscape filled with ruined houses, dirty streets, and warped windows. The world itself reflects the uncertainty and conflict that have been growing throughout the game.

The environment becomes another feedback system: as the world grows more distorted, players learn to read the space itself as a signal of how far Indika’s grip on reality has slipped.

This change is reinforced through camera perspective. The final sequence shifts from third person to first person, placing the player inside an already distorted world. Combined with the warped camera angle this makes the experience feel more unsettling. The player is no longer just watching a broken world but experiencing it directly.

Core UX signal: this shift changes not just what the player sees, but how much control and orientation they feel they have.

By creating such a strong contrast between the beginning and the end, Indika leaves space for interpretation. The game does not give a simple answer about what is real, what is faith, or what is illusion. Instead, it places the player inside that uncertainty and lets them confront the same contradictions that define Indika’s journey.

Five Ways to Design with PX Contrast in Mind

Indika shows that effective game UX does not always require traditional consistency. Sometimes intentional inconsistency can create meaning. PX Contrast shows how contradictions between systems can become coherent when they reinforce the same emotional idea.

A few practical takeaways I’ll carry into my next project:

Ask what the contrast reveals, not just how it looks.Contrast is a communication tool, not decoration. It should tell the player something about the character or the world, not just create visual variety.
Repeat the same idea across every system you control.Interface, sound, pacing, progression, and environment can each carry the same emotional message through different means. The way Indika’s faith points, retro chimes, and monastery-to-ruin arc all repeat one idea.
Let systems teach interpretation, not just mechanics.A UI element, a sound cue, or a pacing shift can train the player to read the fiction in a specific way — the way Indika’s UI reframes prayer as a point system, or its camera shift changes how much control the player feels they have.
Use contradictions deliberately.A mismatch between mechanics and narrative can either damage immersion or become the core of the experience.

Why it still stays with me

None of this requires knowing what Svetlov actually intended. Games, like any art form, keep generating interpretations their creators never planned for — and the strongest ones leave room for that. Indika did that for me. I played it in 2024, and it still stays with me because every part of its design serves the same emotional truth: it creates contrast without trying to resolve it.

After all, we so often look for simple answers in art and so often remain dissatisfied when we’re left alone with uncomfortable unanswered questions. But isn’t that the best thing that any experience can give us?— Dmitry Svetlov for Game Developer

That’s what I’ll check next time. When design feels “off”, the question isn’t whether the contradiction should be resolved. It’s whether the tension creates meaning and whether contradictory experiences reveal something meaningful about the player, the character, or the world.

If you’ve spotted this same pattern somewhere else (a game, an app, a piece of software) that seemed “inconsistent” on purpose I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

All screenshots and gameplay footage are my own captures from my playthrough of Indika unless a different source is credited.

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The UX of contrast: what Indika taught me about designing intentional contradiction