I don't know, that last little bit was pretty hilarious and might have been worth the price alone.

You gave the answer to your own complaint. This game is the equivalent of a Sci-Fi 'page turner' novel. Instead of having characters you care about or a traditional story, it delivers it's motivation through ambient story telling via audio/visuals. It's goal isn't to deliver a deeper story or rich characters; it is immersing you in this bizarre sci-fi world and if it hooks you, then the game is doing it's job. The game isn't explaining this world or how it got this way, it is simply dropping you in and taking you through it as it exists. Obviously not everyone is going to like this; no game is going to please everyone, just like not every book/movie/etc is going to please everyone.

I liked it way more than Limbo, and I thought the ending was amazing.

As for refunding, that's up to you I guess, but I do think it's a little odd to beat a game then return it.

I did enjoy the game very much, but feel the extreme mystique I heard on the bombcast became a slight detriment to my playthrough. The puzzles were fine and the environments are beautifully designed. Near the end of the game I kept thinking things would culminate into something more, but It just kinda ended. Regardless, it was a good time. I like short experiences like this a lot these days. In a time in my life where I don't finish games anywhere as much as I used to, I was happy to see the credits fade on screen.

Let the symbolic analyzation begin!

Do you remember when Uncharted was coming out, and one of the things they were billing was the variety of animations for when Nathan hides behind a wall? He would crouch, he would wince, he would put a hand here, he would put both hands there, etc. Uncharted is commonly referred to as the most expertly-produced graphical accomplishment of both this and the previous generation for attention to detail in things like that. But then, sometimes, you get your head stuck in a wall, or he springs back and forth like a rubber ball, or you twitch through a rock and fall into nothingness. The illusion breaks, but it's okay because the SCALE of the illusion is so enormous it's like nitpicking a little smudge. No big deal.

Inside is like if you took that attention to detail in animation, set design, and art design, and all the time and effort required for a game as big as Uncharted, and put everyone to work for the same amount of time on 2 hours of gameplay. The fluidity of every single aesthetic element in that game is utterly pristine. The way the player character transitions from any one movement into the next; the subtle movement of his head, his hands, his torso, his shoulders; the movement of the clones as they stumble after you; the fish flitting here and there around you as you swim; the chicks skittering and tripping, trying to stay out from under your feet; the musical cues on big set pieces, namely the mining equipment as you solve the first step of that puzzle to get past it.

A very easy point of reference is the legs and arms on the massive blob you become at the end of the game as you simply move around; all of it is procedurally animated, and yet somehow it actually looks natural. And even then, I can't actually say for sure it's procedurally generated - it's just the only thing that explains how every foot lands in what looks like the right place without replicating the step before it. Another great reference point is all of the white-collar people staring in awe and fleeing in terror from you at the end of the game. It's all perfect, none of it looks gamey or - here's the operative word - cheap. If this game is anything at all, it was certainly not cheap to make, and almost as importantly, its graphical veneer never breaks. Say what you will about the puzzles or the story, but the experience of moving through it is as fluid as water. If that doesn't satisfy you, that's totally fine, but the price makes perfect sense - it just may be that it wasn't the sort of thing you were placing value on when deciding to buy it.

Speaking of short experiential games that will probably show up on a lot of the year's top-ten lists, at least Inside was mildly amusing. Firewatch was garbage.

The price/length didn't bother me, but even so the sheer amount of praise seems insane. It was all very nice looking, it played well in its simple way, but nothing about Inside has really stuck with me. I loved Limbo, but Inside would have been at best a 4/5 for me, and that is on the high end...i'd have to consider it more. The idea that it is some huge advancement over Limbo just seems false to me...it's been improved in some ways, but it very much does feel like more Limbo to me, despite claims otherwise, and I didn't find it nearly as interesting. In addition to that, the puzzles in Limbo did eventually get sort of complex, while Inside is very simple all the way through.

Besides length, take into account scope of both the title and the team. It's not a large scale title. It's a beautiful game, yeah, but it's a smaller downloadable, it gets by on art style rather than powerhouse graphics, and I get the impression Playdead isn't a very big studio. One could then bring up No Man's Sky, but that's not really the same situation. Hello Games is using algorithms to generate much of the content there, something Playdead couldn't very effectively do with INSIDE. It's just not the same kind of game.

I realize that not everyone gives a shit about these kinds of things, and for them, 20 bucks for 2 hours is the same regardless. For me, these factors all play a big part in it.

Better or worse than Gone Home?

This was the very first time I made use of the steam refund system. Hopefully they'll grant me the money back despite my being some 20 minutes over the limit due to that I left the game running in the main menu while I was cooking.

I cannot even begin to believe how much I disliked this. I feel so incredibly cheated, an experience I've never had to this extent with a video-game before. I've been disappointed, sure, but not to this degree. I LOVED Limbo, so I was expecting plenty from this. Unfortunately, there were only two sequences that I even enjoyed.

The play-time is one thing, but the game itself is so absurdly simplistic. There's none of the clever puzzle solving that made Limbo so special to me. So much of the world is just dead and bland and grey. Any personality comes through only in set moments that you're supposed to be looking at. And they actually pad the fucking thing out by having you run back and forth over too long hallways, with nothing to look at, again and again and again. By the way, that is in fact the solution to 80 % of the puzzles.

Jesus. I'm glad you guys enjoyed this. To each their own and all that. I probably would have for 5 bucks, too. But even then, it'd be a 3 star experience for me, at most. For 20 bucks, mind you.. Just no.

What? Inside's puzzles were way more varied and interesting than ones in Limbo, all the puzzles in Limbo were basically just "jump over things" or "drag a thing to a thing". Also, the thing about running back and forth is straight up a lie, you have to do that maybe like once and even then it's not something that takes long.

@simkas: I can name more than a few off the top of my head. "Jump in the water to lure it over here, then run to the other end, hit a switch, run back over the hallway, jump into the water on the other end, lure it there, run back over the hallway, hit a button and swim" happens twice, in that exact order, only you just need to hit the button once the first time. Or in the puzzle where you're gathering up your little posse for the most illogical number-requirement imaginable, you're literally running back and forth twice on the lowest sub-level, more if you went the "wrong" way first and once in the middle one. That room had to take a full minute to traverse as opposed to like 10 seconds because there is a big wall of brown you probably wanna' look at. Or that puzzle where you have to hide behind a box so the fellas coming in through the big door doesn't spot you. Except you don't need that box in the first place, it's literally just a big, empty warehouse you run through to find a box you can push to hide from people who spawn once you reach the opposite side of it. Then there's the "puzzle" where you bring the fellas suspended in the weird gravity water down and have 'em boost you. I could go on.

And hey, I might have inflated memories of what Limbo was due to the waxing powers of nostalgia, but I recall at least being challenged by that game. Some difficult jump, timing was required, pretty good physics puzzles as well. I just breezed right through this game.

QUICK EDIT: And yeah, I am being purposefully vague and nonsensical in my description of them puzzles to avoid spoiling folks. I hope anyone who's played the game understands the references, though. All that said, I do not want to get into an argument with you here, buddy. Just responding to being called a liar, and that's that.

I didn't like Limbo at all and I loved this game. Its crazy to me that you think this game doesn't have a story. It does, but it delivers it in subtly and in atmosphere. And the game isn't about the story anyway. More about the themes it delivers to you as you venture through the game. The last bit of the game had my jaw literally hanging open, just saying variations of "no fucking way this is happening" to myself. I recommend you going to read some of the other threads and read people's theories. What this game delivers isn't shallow. Its something that should stick with you as you roll it around in your head, digesting what its telling you. This game will stick with me for a while and that's what I feel justifies the price. I don't think if someone asked me to recommend them a fun game this would be the first thing I would point them to, but if someone wanted a game with more that just shallow cut scenes yelling at them to shoot the guys in the next room to save the world, this is absolutely a must play game. The 2-3 it took me to play this game was absolutely worth 20 dollars.

I will say the puzzles weren't the best and some of the environments in which the puzzles took place were too big and tedious to walk back and forth through if a solution wasn't readily apparent.

Sound kind of like Limbo. And the fact that you get people saying "no you don't get it it's so simple it's an allegory for game development" and then others come along and say "no you don't get it it's so simple it's an allegory for social uprising" and then others yet come and say "no you don't get it it's so simple it's an allegory for abortion/the 2016 U.S. elections/the struggles of being a teenage girl/whatever" tells me that it's probably not an allegory for shit -- not in any meaningful or well-realized way, at least -- it's just a story that's vague and simple enough that you can imagine it to be an allegory for any number of things. Kind of like how if I threw paint at a wall you'd be able to see all kinds of figures in the splotches, not because I'm a super talented artist telling deep stories with my deep symbolism so allegorical man whoah, but because a splotch of paint is a big nothing on which you can consequently project anything. If the supposed value of a story is that I can sit down and imagine x number of different things that it could possibly be an allegory for and then feel smart about "getting it," then that's not a good story. It's a worthless story, a big nothing of a story. Animal Farm is a good allegorical story and guess what, you could appreciate it without even understanding that it's an allegory because it is quite simply an excellent story by an excellent writer with real talent and real skills.

The visuals look sort of cool so at least that's something.

@icemael: Or, you know, it just has multiple meanings. Any good work of fiction can be read into in different ways, and have multiple different meanings drawn from it.

Cinematic platformers usually have a vague and simple story because they tend to rely heavily on atmosphere, unique visuals and being in a unfamiliar place. See Another World, Abes Odyssey, Heart of Darkness. The visuals are mostly telling the so called "story" or "narrative". Inside takes it a step further than previous games in the genre by providing no informative introduction or real narrative throughout the game but I think makes up for it by being pretty obvious in showing you the basic premise of what is going on. I don't think it is to be pondered over. Of course you could if you want to. That is the nice thing about it.

I'm in the same boat as you, OP. Although I wasn't necessarily disappointed by the length. I'm happy to pay $20 for a 2-3 hour game if it's of a very high quality, but I didn't come out of Inside thinking "if only this game had another 3 hours of boring puzzles and glacial movement speed over long stretches of nothingness, THEN IT'D BE GOOD." Inside seemed intent on putting me to sleep from the jump, and it was only in the ending sequence that I felt any real desire to see what happened next. I actively disliked Limbo, but the praise for this game (even outside of Brad) was so hyperbolic that I figured it would transcend its predecessor. Boy was I fucking wrong. Add this to the list of mechanically-lame indie games that got showered with praise thanks to some nice art and a narrative. I'm really hoping Jeff brought it to Inside on this week's Bombcast because, holy shit, someone has to.

Because, with games like Inside, too much research can very easily negatively impact your experience.

This discussion reminds me of the discussions you get for a lot of David Lynch films. They're films that often don't give you the plot, have crazy juxtapositions of tone, and almost completely rely of the audience figuring out what's going on/making their own interpretation. But they're very popular, and consistently have praise showered on them. Some people get extremely frustrated with that, not because they're not engaging with the movies at the same level as the fans, but because they have that same informed viewpoint but think its neatly arranged nonsense with no through-line. Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive have plots, but they try as hard as they can to make you wonder if it's worth looking for it, because you can feel like David Lynch is just making shit up as he goes along (And in the case of Inland Empire, I heard he just filmed scenes sporadically as they came to his head). It all cruxes on whether or not you believe the works have an in-world logic that is consistent and you feel like information about the world exists that you'll never see.

I think that in the case of Inside, some people who don't think there's a plot don't believe that everything that was shown is actually following the internal logic of a living world, and the creators are holding their arms up going "I guess you'll have to figure it all out/its whatever you think it is!" I can understand that, it's frustrating as fuck and feels so hollow when any art piece ends holding a mirror to the audience - hell the bombcast jokes about this twist being cheesy as hell because it's hilarious.

I trust the creators and think there's meaning to it all that isn't just a hokey allegory - that being said, I think discussion about what exists in that world rather than what it represents is way more fucking interesting and am really not interested in people pulling associations together like Jeff Goldblum in Independence day where this->that->therefore it all represents cancer. There are some really great themes going on though - I love that the mind control puzzles and the air-compression blocks progress in a way similar to the narrative, where at first we're given an ability but only in a constrained manner, before breaking the constraints on it and wandering around doing crazy shit with the thing now its not attached to a wall/restraint. It's also really interesting to me that you can look at the story in completely different perspectives; one where the boy is unknowingly indoctrinated into freeing the blob thing before becoming one with it, or another where the boy was always a part of the blob and returned to its weird instrumental fleshy form once he did his job, making the blob somewhat whole again.

The ambiguities of the escape are my favourite part of this shit, where you don't know why the people helped you, and whether or not it was all planned. I love the amount of questions you're given that could very likely be answered through combined observation, and to me it doesn't feel like the game wanted to confuse you into thinking it's deeper than it is, mainly because there aren't many completely mysterious plot elements that seem to exist as symbolism and nothing else.

@godberry: Yeah, to me that cancer metaphor was maybe the least interesting reading of Inside I've yet seen. Especially since you could take pretty much any game where you're sneaking around and sabotaging a thing and draw the same parallels. "See, halfway through the game, the enemies get harder. That represents them stepping it up to chemo." Give me a break. If that's what the creators actually intended, that would make the game so much more boring.

@tanked: I get that. I will myself be going into Inside totally fresh. I have seen about 3 minutes of the quick look and that's it. All I was speaking about, like another poster mentioned, was simply checking a site like howlongtobeat to find the games length if it's going to be a deal breaker for you.

To be fair, sometimes you swim to the right too.

@tanked: I'm eagerly awaiting the allegory that all of this is some take on The Divine Comedy where each numbered area represents a circle of hell hahaha.

I know. Next someone will be telling me that Braid is an allegory for the creation of the atomic bomb!

Braid is an allegory for the creation of the atomic bomb. No, really. Jonathan Blow's games are as good as they are pretentious, and they're very good.

Didn't he come out and say that was the closest anyone got to his intended interpretation, but it still wasn't the ACTUAL interpretation he had in mind? I might be misremembering things.

Having finished the game as of last night, I will admit that the argument that "the game is padded out by running back and forth" isn't really inaccurate. A few puzzles are solved by doing just that, essentially. I don't know if I'd say that occurs in nearly the length or duration to cumulate more than a minute total of playtime, though. At some point, you sound like you just didn't want to move a character around.

I was let down by how simple the puzzles were but really enjoyed everything else. If you enjoyed the "oh shit" moment in at the end of Braid more than spending hours mulling over a tricky puzzle, I'd say give this a shot.

I also do not agree with people who say this has no story. Sometimes an attack dog isn't an attack dog. If you go through that last part and don't have any idea what the last image means, I would suggest just thinking on your journey a bit.

I really liked Limbo. I liked some parts of Inside, but overall, I didn't like Inside. The length of the game didn't factor into it. I would give it a 2 out of 5.