It’s been six years since Limbo’s exhibition of grotesque platforming, and many games (Monochroma, Albert & Otto) have riffed on its muted color pallet and occupation with puzzles. Inside, a 2D platformer with puzzle elements, is a lot like Limbo. This is expected, as it comes from the same Copenhagen development team at Playdead.
On the surface, Inside may look a little too much like Limbo. You control a faceless youngster as he carefully makes his way across vicious hellscapes and avoids clever pitfalls. Inside’s four or five hour runtime is about the same, as is a preference for indistinct coloring and crafty use of the background and foreground. This is Playdead’s aesthetic, and it’s also where comparisons to Limbo end. Every step of the way, Inside either improves upon or outright transcends its spiritual predecessor.
Early on, Inside’s confidence in design is passed on to trust in the player. There are no tutorials, button prompts, or conspicuous clues scattered in the environment. There isn’t even a start screen or any dialogue. Approaching something that looks like a wood chipper and pressing a few buttons reveals a pull crank. Just like in real life, pump it a couple of times to start the machine and work out its use in a puzzle. Similarly, the player learns of danger by running away from dogs and staying clear of every available human being.
Teaching the player without explicitly providing instruction sounds like an obvious objective, but, more often than not, it’s extremely difficult. It’s this reason that Inside’s base mechanics aren’t mired in gimmicks or subject to too much modification, and that the only tangible objective is to not die from the hostility of the boy’s surroundings. Getting caught by dogs, exposed by a spotlight, snatched by aggressive watchers, drowned in a pool, or obliterated by invisible (and yet easily recognized) forces all build into a mental queue of imminent doom. Unlike Limbo, Inside doesn’t often demand rigorous trial and error, relying instead on context and tenacity to facilitate progression.
There are plenty of things to do within Inside’s boundaries. In one instance the boy can pilot a small submarine, creating its own series of strengths and limitations. Another gadget, a kind of mind control helmet, is borrowed from Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee and applied to expansive puzzle sequences. By interacting with a device, the boy can take control over seemingly mindless NPC’s and manually direct them onto or around objects in different parts of the environment. Eventually Inside allows control over multiple NPC’s, but it never subjects the player to a demanding performance with a small margin of error. It assembles a legion of support without losing focus of its own principles.
Inside’s puzzles aren’t necessarily simple, but they are prone to looking more complicated than they actually are. One particular sequence involved manipulating a room full of water with two doors on both sides and a moveable crate in the center. Moving the water too high resulted in the exit door slamming shut. I tried everything to prevent this—flipping the switch and riding the box up with the water, wedging the box in the entry door to prevent it from shutting, any measure of incremental jumping—and eventually started getting upset at my repeated failure. The true solution was incredibly simple, but Inside, even with a lack of variables in the field, is adept at providing red herrings.
Puzzles are part of Inside’s platform, but I am hesitant to call it a puzzle platformer. Each one feels refined to a singular, perfect solution and yet it’s rare to waltz right through them. Furthermore, the same tricks are rarely repeated, with Inside essentially breaking down into distinct, thematic “levels” focused around the same objective. With all of that in mind, each sequence feels like tourism on the path to some larger idea. Puzzles are vehicles to explore Inside’s haunting, challenging, and expressive environments.
Thought and consideration are challenges better left to the nature of Inside’s world. What’s the boy doing there? Is he escaping or returning? Are his presumed adversaries evil, obsessed, or indifferent to human emotion? Is any of this human? Do these experiments exist to serve humanity or destroy it? Occasionally the player is an active participant in these questions, such as when the boy falls in a living assembly line and is forced to mimic actions to pass rudimentary tests. While Inside’s conclusion has a definite sense of finality, it doesn’t have enough overt action to draw any sort of specific conclusion.
Instead, Inside appears to be built for discussion and speculation. It’s not the same as something like P.T. which was openly assembled for viral discussion, but rather a consciously low-key invitation to a mystery, the subtlety of which is usually absent in interactive entertainment. Kentucky Route Zero appears the have similar goals, but the closest analog is assertive but indirect nature Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (which Inside directly references) and maybe some of the more macabre and disturbing allusions of horror found in David Cronenberg’s earlier films.
Inside culminates in a third act that has to be experienced to be appreciated. Spoiler culture is a byproduct of 2016 that I usually consider misguided, but the severity of this sequence demands an uncorrupted preamble. Inside’s lingering mystery masterfully builds into a simmering tension that outright demands resolution. Plenty of games have pulled the curtain away to thunderous applause. Only Inside has room for shock, panic, and the inconceivable notion that the nightmare isn’t yet over.
Before the third act happened Inside operated as a respectful and assured entry in puzzle-friendly platforming and devoted world-building. After that, it jumped over the flag, brought Aeris back to life, found Shen Long, or whatever metaphor for videogame transcendence you’d prefer to employ. Time will tell if I’m spending some kind of recency bias toward a sequence I personally found unbelievable, but in this moment and at this time, Inside eclipsed expectations and performed at a level higher than any of its peers.
