Today I realized that I have to mention something before September is over: the indie game Iji is ten years old. That’s right, Swedish developer Daniel Remar’s highly innovative action-adventure title debuted on September 1st 2008, a whole decade ago. This makes me feel reflective, melancholy but most of all appreciative. Iji was a pretty formative game for me during my college years. Daniel Remar worked diligently on this game for 4 years, and released it for free; despite numerous fans requesting a paid Steam release, it’s been free ever since. Listening to Iji’s remarkable original soundtrack still gives me faint echoes of awkward first dates, marathon gaming tournaments in the commuter student lounge, and crisp fall walks across OSU campus.
More than that, Iji resonated so strongly with me for a couple of reasons: it takes direct inspiration from two of my favorite series, Metroid and System Shock, and it expands those formulas of exploration, hacking, and combat into some profound ethical territory. Iji implemented pacifist and genocide runs with far more elegance and subtlety than the vastly overrated Undertale, and years earlier too. An Iji pacifist playthrough was tricky, punitive; it required careful stewardship of your skill tree and thoughtful, intentional navigation of the environment and live combat.
But the payoff was richly rewarding. I remember my first run through the game, playing an action game as I normally would and blasting everything in sight, and reading text logs between one of the alien enemies and her girlfriend. I eventually realized I’d casually murdered one of these people in cold blood and directly enabled the death of the other, just by playing the game “normally.” When I finally managed a pacifist run, it was uniquely satisfying to see these star-crossed lovers both make it out alive.
Far more than any subsequent “message” game peddling a hackneyed plot and heavy-handed moralizing, Iji delivered complex, addictive gameplay intricately interwoven with a multilayered narrative that left you second-guessing your decisions for days. It was an indie game in every sense of the word, gameplay-rich with an artist-driven vision and story, long before the term “indie game” became unfairly associated with runaway vanity projects, thinly veiled ham-fisted politics and buckets of pretentiousness.
While Daniel Remar has consistently stated that there will be no sequels to Iji, amazingly the man is still updating the game. Last year he released a major overhaul that updated Iji to the latest version of GameMaker Studio, expanded the gameplay to make various playstyles more intuitive and rewarding, and even added new endings to the story. 10 years on, Iji is still the lesser-known, underappreciated indie game, humble but teeming with content and nuance right under the surface. If you haven’t played it before I strongly recommend giving it a look. You can check out Youtuber Pixelated Memories’ look back on Iji below.
