Inside - Dead Kids
How many times must I see a child die in horrible pain? How many times must I watch my character being murdered, shot, drowned, devoured, dismembered or crushed, only for the camera to awkwardly fade to black, annoyed and embarrassed, as if to say "Whoops. Oh well..."? How many times can a game kill a small boy, in ways going from the abject (strangled to death by an adult man in front of his own son) to the absurd (blown up in little pieces by a wave of ultrasound), only to serve its own, idiot nihilism?
The solution according to developer Playdead, already in place in their previous effort Limbo, is to abstract the body of the victim as much as possible. Take away their face, their voice, keep a safe distance from them, and reduce them to a simple silhouette. As such, we won't feel too bad when when the game decides to kill a infant like an unforgiving executioner. What Inside achieves is sanitizing its own cruelty, putting a bag on the head of a hanged man hidden behind closed doors. And yet the game has the nerve, the audacity to base its meaning on dehumanization, on science and industries turning people into braindead, unformed masses at their mercy, all while doing the same to us, the player, and building its foundations on the shocking sight of dead kids.
Inside doesn't want us to think, either on its subject, its narrative structure, lifted directly from Limbo with parts shuffled around, or its mechanics, which amount to little more than running to the right and solve the occasional puzzles; puzzles that are rarely difficult, but whose consequence for failing are obscenely high. Inside is what the video game community, fans, reviewers and journalists would call "an experience"; a walk through an intricate theme park haunted house. See the sights, have your emotions, your interpretations, but do not question our superiority, all of this culminating in a crowd-pleasing action scene, a coup-de-grâce worthy of all bastard films of the last decade. Those last minutes may be radically different from everything that came before it, but they very well represent the game as a whole: a monstrous mass of mindless flesh, a disgusting mix between the superficial social commentary of a Terry Gilliam and the patronizing sadism of a Michael Haneke.
