Developer Odd Meter Publisher 11 Bit Studios Format PC Release Out now

The young nun trudges up the wet dirt path that carves the snow in two, steel pail in hand. Arriving at the well, she places it down, grabbing the chain attached to the well’s own bucket before turning the handle to lower it into the water. When it reaches the bottom, she winds the handle in the opposite direction to winch it back up, before pouring its contents into her own receptacle, retracing her steps back to a barrel into which she must deposit the water. Against this starkly convincing backdrop, a pop-up displayed in bright orange pixels appears – making it clear that this is the first of five identical back-and-forth trips that Indika, under our guidance, will be forced to make. We’re understandably put out, but not as much as we are by our reward, as an older sister emerges from a nearby door and promptly undoes the past ten minutes of toil.

Indika, needless to say, is not in a good place – literally and figuratively – and Odd Meter’s eccentric narrative adventure wants to give you some sense of how that feels. This is not even your first chore, having already ferried a basket of potatoes from the warehouse to the refectory. Such drudgery gives you a flavour of Indika’s daily grind, but its incongruous UI, with its glowing rewards and pixellated upgrade paths, seems to be simultaneously satirising the shallow gamification of menial tasks. It draws a line, too, between the meta-rewards games offer and the idea that completing virtuous deeds might bring one closer to God.