Day One

• Game: Playdead's Inside.
• Release Month: June.
• Quick Look: Here. (Brad/Dan)
• Started: 01/12.
• Completed: 01/12.

Inside is a 2D, monochromatic (mostly) platformer from Playdead and the spiritual successor to their 2010 Indie hit Limbo. Like that game, your prepubescent hero runs, hobbles, swims, trips, falls and sneaks through a series of environments, forever following a linear path that nonetheless seems to go on for miles. Inside also shares a great deal of similarities with Limbo's overall aesthetic: the world is depicted as a dark, terrifying and hostile place, one in which a child is unlikely to survive long, and the game makes ample use of shading and silhouettes to render its already macabre story in a stark veneer.

In Limbo you spent most of your time either attempting timing-based set-pieces, usually involving hostile forces pursuing you that need to be outsmarted as often as they need to be outpaced, or solving physics puzzles to facilitate further progress. Inside continues in that vein, giving the player a number of quiet moments to consider the logistics of pushing boxes up against walls for an extra bit of lift or switching levers in the right order, bookended with moments of frantic panic as you avoid the jaws of rabid dogs and some crappy adults far too eager to commit a bit of paedocide (which is a really unpleasant word, now I've written it and read it back to myself). Whereas Limbo felt like an absurdly grim fairytale - though when are they ever not? - Inside feels more like a dystopian sci-fi movie where we see the world from the child hero's perspective, and adults are rendered as these indistinct and inscrutable creatures that cannot easily be reasoned with. Think something like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial - a comparison I feel is probably fairly overtly referenced by the designers themselves, given the red sweater and jeans combo that the protagonists of E.T. and Inside both wear.

It's hard to argue for Inside's case. Not because I found it lacking - Brad's five-star score and effusive review were warranted, even if I take some small issue with how the game's overall length is as long as a movie - but because so much of what it does right is in the moment-to-moment minutia, the ingenuity of its puzzles, the mise-en-scéne storytelling (which I think is just a fancy way of saying "you gotta figure it out from the context given by the setting, because there's no dialogue whatsoever") and the spoiler-rich terrors that appear later in the game. An early fracas with a manic pig infected with a mind-controlling parasitic worm is merely the tip of the iceberg in many respects, and given the game's short length these fleeting moments of narrative insanity and brilliant level design are the greatest tools the game has to beguile its players. Just like how I wouldn't spoil the best scenes of a thriller movie by describing them in detail, I wouldn't want to do the same here, though I imagine the Giant Bomb boys will be a little less squeamish about revealing too much (about the game, I mean) when it comes to discussing Inside's place in their GOTY deliberations.

All I can say is, you should probably buy this game. Consider the short length, absolutely, but as a game that's been out for almost half a year it's probably dropped in price to the extent that a time-to-cost value consideration is largely moot. It's not only worth playing if you're into puzzle-platformer games with a bleak aesthetic and a cinematic confidence usually quite rare in the Indie sphere, but for a story that's worth experiencing first-hand before GB spoils it for you.

(In spite of my negative comments, I really am looking forward to Giant Bomb's GOTY talks later this month. When you have a year as packed as this one to dismantle, it's going to get heated.)

< Back to the Go! Go! GOTY! 2016 contents page