Do what you love, they say, and you’ll never work a day in your life. In the indie game Ikeelya, I’m doing that by balancing my day job as a patient, relentless assassin with my true love — crafting cozy living rooms. Ikeelya mixes the joy of browsing an Ikea catalog with the pressure of being a sniper. It’s almost like two games in one, connected by the thread of our hapless protagonist and a polite but nosy neighbor.
In Ikeelya, you step into the shoes of Barry, a grown-ass man who lives in an empty apartment worthy of r/malelivingspaces. I’m broke as a joke, so I have to take an assassination contract. These contracts are pretty quick to complete. I sit and wait for the target to emerge, take aim, and fire. Every time I miss, my shadowy boss yells at me and deducts some of my pay, so it’s in my best interest to make every job quick and clean.
The problem is that Barry is vocally unhappy about his empty apartment and sad life. The delivery on some of Barry’s lines, combined with the absurdity of the situation, cracked me up. My man is lying prone on some high-up perch, waiting for a phone call about his next target, then waiting for hours for a guy dressed like Santa Claus to come into view. And the whole time, he’s thinking about how he has nowhere to store his shirts, which means they’re always wrinkled. He doesn’t want this life anymore; he wants to set up lamps and think about the perfect place for a potted plant.
Enter his neighbor Betty, a mannerly lady who drops by with leftover lasagna and slightly pushy advice. Eventually, she admits she’s been looking through Barry’s windows at his increasingly nice apartment layout, which is kind of weird — but hey, she has an interior decoration job for me. After I rearrange her living room, she praises me endlessly, and offers me more jobs. The next thing I know, I’m avoiding sniper contracts so I can carefully set up a nice arrangement on my dining table.
Between missions, I watch over Barry’s home, where I can flip through a catalog, customize my decor, and take photos of my sweet setup. If I hang out, Betty will stroll up to ask some personal questions and offer me a freelance gig, like overhauling a teenage girl’s bedroom or revitalizing a stale family room. It’s like an isometric House Flipper, but punctuated with Barry’s primary profession. When I’m short on cash and need a big payday quick — for a cool new TV, for instance — I can pick up a sniper contract, where I watch over a Where’s Waldo-style page of colorful characters until I’m informed who my mark is, and line up the perfect shot.
Ikeelya is available free on itch.io as a “name your own price” Windows game. It was originally created for a game jam, but co-creators Cukia “Sugar” Kimani and Henrike Lode polished the game after the jam, putting out a new version that sands down the rough edges and giving it a bit more depth. This game was a delightful way to spend an afternoon, and the contrast between being threatened by my mob boss and painstakingly arranging my entertainment center makes each activity sweeter.
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