Indie game Ikeelya dares to ask: what if an assassin enjoyed designing breakfast nooks?

Do what you love, they say, and you’ll never work a day in your life. In the indie game IkeelyaI do this by combining my day job as a patient, ruthless killer with my true love: creating cozy living rooms. Ikeelya combines the pleasure of browsing an Ikea catalog with the pressure of a sniper. It’s almost two games in one, connected by the thread of our hapless protagonist and a polite but nosy neighbor.

In Ikeelyayou step into the shoes of Barry, a grown man living in an empty apartment worthy of r/malelivingspaces. I’m jokingly broke, so I have to make a murder contract. These contracts can be completed fairly quickly. I sit and wait for the target to emerge, aim and fire. Every time I miss, my shadowy boss yells at me and withholds some of my pay, so it’s in my best interest to complete every job quickly and neatly.

The problem is that Barry is decidedly dissatisfied with his empty apartment and sad life. The delivery of some of Barry’s lines, combined with the absurdity of the situation, cracked me up. My husband lies on a high spot, waiting for a call about his next target, then waiting for hours for a man dressed as Santa Claus to come into view. And all the time he thinks about how he has nowhere to put his shirts, so they are always wrinkled. He doesn’t want this life anymore; he wants to put up lamps and think about the perfect place for a potted plant.

Then his neighbor Betty comes in, a well-mannered lady who comes by with leftover lasagna and some pushy advice. Eventually she admits that she’s been looking through Barry’s windows at the increasingly beautiful layout of his apartment, which is kind of weird – but hey, she’s got an interior design job for me. After I redecorate 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 room table.

In between missions, I watch over Barry’s house, where I can browse a catalog, customize my decor, and take photos of my beautiful setup. As I hang out, Betty comes up to me to ask some personal questions and offers me a freelance job, like redecorating a teenage girl’s bedroom or breathing new life into a musty family room. It’s like an isometric House Flipperbut interrupted by Barry’s main profession. If I’m short on money and need a big payday quickly—for a cool new TV, for example—I can sign a sniper contract where I watch over a Where’s Waldostyle sheet with colorful characters until I learn who my target is and line up the perfect photo.

Ikeelya is available for free on itch.io as a “name your own price” Windows game. It was originally created for a game jambut co-creators Cukia “Sugar” Kimani And Henrike Lode polished the game after the jam, release a new version that sands away the rough edges and gives it some 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 every activity more enjoyable.