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    Inside

    Game » consists of 5 releases. Released Jun 29, 2016

    A game from Limbo developers, Playdead, set in a dystopian environment.

    The Silhouette and the Screens: The Themes of Inside

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    gamer_152

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    Edited By gamer_152  Moderator

    Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Inside and the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, as well as mild spoilers for Limbo.

    Between the development of Limbo and its spiritual successor, Inside, Playdead Studios made relatively few changes to their formula. However, one of the biggest leaps forwards was in how the studio worked vagueness into their narrative. Both Limbo and Inside refuse to spell out exactly what's going on at any one time, seeing a virtue in us as players cooking up theories about the games' events. The difference between the two is that Inside offers so many more hooks from which you can hang those theories.

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    Limbo has an ambiguous ending and an unexplained premise that encourage player interpretation, but Inside uses more background characters and props for you to draw lines between, letting you tell yourself a more detailed story. For me, the running thread through Inside's story is one of psychological control. Playdead begin executing on this when the plot is young, after you shake the armed pursuers and reach the farm. Here you launch some chicks at a crate to knock it from the rafters and are then attacked by a raging pig. The pig calms down after you rip what appears to be one of the mind-controlling parasites from Limbo out of its body, allowing you to drag it across the room to use as a platform. You can then release a group of humans (or perhaps humanoids) from a holding pen and use a device to mind-control them into building you an exit to the area. Let's deconstruct this.

    Firstly, there's the very loud messaging that you are treating the people in this scene like livestock. You find them in a cage on a farm, and like the animals, you use them as nothing more than a puzzle-solving method. It's particularly dehumanising that the game has you use these people the same way you use the pig, and that only makes the cart of dead pigs you find on the farm seem like a more disconcerting commentary. Remember also that the pig you use has a mind-controlling worm inside it. There's a symmetry between the way the parasite uses the pig and the way you use the people here.

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    Not long after the farm, you come to a warehouse into which black-clothed citizens or workers are marching in unison, their heads drooping from their necks. They appear to be in some way controlled right down to the timing of their movement by authoritarian overseers. To make it past these overseers, you must mimic the marching, jumping, and turning of these drones. Any movement outside of the script will get you tased and dragged off, which is unpleasantly shocking every time it happens. This section teaches you what it's like to be controlled and it's not nice. Even if the humanoids you took control of at the farm don't feel as trapped and fragile as you do here, it's a message from Inside that forcing another person to conform to your wishes is fundamentally bad. If you pay close attention, you can also see that while these humans enter the processing facilities in everyday clothes, they are later seen in work gear, expressing either a literal or metaphorical reduction of regular citizens to hard labourers.

    As you scramble ahead, you can see the brainwashed through the gaps between the buildings, moving in lockstep to unseen endpoints. What appear to be cargo trains carry them away for use elsewhere, telling us their owners probably handle them as a processed commodity, while their abundance in the mines suggests that they're used as a cheap or free form of labour. As monstrous as this seems, you, just like the surrounding dystopia, exploit these people for your own ends by using the mind-control helmets to manipulate them into providing the solution to gameplay challenges. That those in charge would have built so many mind-control helmets tells you about how they're willing to treat other people, but the helmets also stand out as a gameplay feature which draws our attention to them. They're original and show up throughout play whereas other mechanics are either boilerplate puzzle game kit like switches and platforms, or they're transitory mechanics that only exist for isolated segments of the game like the submarine or the sliding door.

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    While you start off using these helmets to control a few people at most, you're eventually shepherding sizeable clusters of humans around to do your work, and what cements this as a relationship of manipulation rather than co-operation is that the people you control never get to move onto the next area with you. You take hold of them to clear a path so you can move ahead, but as soon as they stop being useful, you discard them. Any work you have them do is for your benefit, not theirs. Then once you hit the third act, something surreal happens, even by Inside's standards. You get absorbed into a fleshy mass covered in writhing limbs that serves as your avatar right up until the ending. "The Huddle", as the devs call it, gives the impression of a number of people mashed together into a superorganism, and while it may seem cosmetically off-putting or ungainly to move about, The Huddle is powerful. As this experimental organism, you can lift boxes higher, break through walls, and cause the authoritarian figures who might have captured or killed you before to flee at the sight of you. For the remainder of the story, you do not use any of the mind-control mechanics, and eventually, scientists in the building even begin helping you. As The Huddle, you bust through the final confining wall of Inside's society to find freedom and peace outside in the natural world.

    We can read Inside as an argument for collectivism. You spend most of the runtime escaping some oppressive force alone or through manipulating others. It feels wrong and doesn't lead to any long-term protection, but when you and others begin acting as a single force, working in unison, you overpower the people who stand in your way and gain freedom. Operating as a single unit has its difficulties, but it's ultimately a more productive and ethical way to break the shackles of authoritarian control. However, there's also a lot of translating of the game you can do even within the last few seconds that can have a serious influence on what you take away. So we're all clear what the final scene entails, let's go over it with a fine-toothed comb.

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    After The Huddle busts through a concrete wall, it rolls down a craggy rock face and comes to a stop at the side of a lake. It sits flat under a shaft of light and control is taken from the player. The camera spends a long time very slowly pulling back before the credits roll. The game necessarily ends at the point we are no longer "inside", and the breaking of the wall is a visual metaphor for The Huddle smashing beyond the boundaries of its society. However, whether this is a triumphant or sombre escape changes radically based on whether we think The Huddle survives this breakout. The way most players have discussed this scene, it's assumed that The Huddle is alive during the final moments, but the framing would make it equally or more believable that the creature dies in this escape.

    Picture it this way: When we first find The Huddle, it is suspended in a tank of fluid, indicating it may need to remain in liquid to live, and as we work our way through the laboratory, it is repeatedly knocked about. The fall down the rocks at the end is one step too far for it. The Huddle goes limp, and our controller inputs stop working. The only other times we see our avatar collapse, and we lose control of them, are when they die. The developers train us to identify death by making it so easy to be killed throughout the game and that lets us recognise the death in the final scene. The lingering camera during this moment is to let us reflect on the character's journey and let it sink in that there's no way to move them. The heavenly beam of light is also symbolic of someone passing on, and The Huddle perishing right by the lake suggests that if it had been able to make it just a few more steps, it would have lived.

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    Inside may be one of the most potent video game tragedies. It's one big fake-out in which a story of misery and isolation takes this turn into uplifting freedom in its final half hour, but only so the developers can have you come crashing down by taking that elating feeling away at the last second. Keep in mind that interpreting the ending as an escape and interpreting it as a death needn't be mutually exclusive. The game depicting death and escape happening in one moment invites you to consider them both as the same thing. You spent the whole game trying to avoid death, but in the end, even getting out of the dystopia wasn't enough to stave it off, and really, death would be the child's and Huddle's ultimate release from the threats that plague them. We watch the game create the same parallel in its alternate ending.

    In the hidden secondary closing to the game, the child enters a secret bunker where they find an unidentified person hooked up to a mind control helmet in front of an array of screens. The kid pulls a cable out of the wall, and the helmet and monitors around the figure in the background go dead. The child falls to their knees, and we quickly cut to black. The most straightforward explanation for this is that the person in the helmet was controlling the protagonist, and again, we can conclude that the player character dies in this ending and that death is their liberation. It may be relevant that, using this interpretation, Inside has a fair bit in common with Harlan Ellison's short sci-fi story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Both have protagonists under the thumb of a dehumanising computer entity, both use the concept of death as liberation, and both have an ending where the protagonist becomes a faceless blob. However, the interpretations I've described here don't fully explain the "bunker" ending as a secret, unlockable conclusion. 100% endings in games are written to build on top of the regular ending/s. This is typically done by having the story end on a higher note and/or by elaborating on the events of the plot. No one could blame you for looking at Inside's 100% ending with some confusion because it doesn't obviously do either.

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    The child dying in the "bunker" scene or both the child and The Huddle living in their respective endings wouldn't make the secret ending any happier than the standard ending. You could conclude that the child lives in the bunker scene but not the Huddle scene, making it the "better" ending, although, as discussed, it genuinely looks like the protagonist dies in the bunker. The secret ending also doesn't obviously set up a sequel or talk any more explicitly about the events that have occurred. Of course, this lack of clarity isn't a mistake. Borrowing again from Limbo, Inside uses ambiguous conclusions because this kind of open-endedness is one of the most proven ways to encourage your audience to think on or concoct their own meaning for the events depicted in your piece of media. Limbo and Inside also both rely on ambiguity over whether their protagonist is alive or dead, and in both cases, they generate some of that ambiguity through their protagonists not having the physical features or script to express much about their biological or emotional state. We can also compare Inside to Braid in that both are puzzle games which find concordance in making their narratives puzzles to solve in themselves. So how do we solve Inside's bunker ending? The way to interpret it is the same way that we should interpret the rest of the game.

    In the secret ending, lighting and composition once again become vital mouthpieces for the developers. The final screen is uncluttered, and the monitors and helmet lights at the back of the room are piercingly bright. This both allows the game to reduce the character in the background to a silhouette, anonymising them, and to draw our attention to the helmet and monitors. Us having to stand there and give the cable a couple of good pulls also means that we can't just run past this set-piece without noticing it. A popular theory among fans is that the person in the helmet represents the player and it's one I subscribe to. Both the figure and the player have monitors in front of them and a means of control over the protagonist. At the end of the game, the player character breaks our control over them. This isn't just a cool, meta novelty but comes back to that essential topic in the game we were talking about: Control. By giving you a motif to associate with thought control (the helmets), the game asks you to connect the literal details of what happens in this ending with the other examples of control you've seen throughout the story.

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    The Huddle ending gently shines a spotlight on our control over the player character, making us more aware of that control by taking it away from us, and by depicting the kid's escape from the horrible dystopia as coming at the same time as escape from our manipulation. Alternatively, we could see it that The Huddle died and almost broke free from player control, but didn't quite make it, just as it didn't quite make it into the tranquil life-giving lake. While the game may seem to end when The Huddle finds freedom, back in the real world, we're going to continue controlling the player character if we want to get all those collectables and unlock the special ending. The game suggests that The Huddle's push for freedom was a false escape by just putting us back in control of the child once the credits finish.

    If we do go to the effort of unlocking the 100% ending, then our reward is not just more story or a more victorious fate for our protagonist. Instead, the ending's primary purpose is to clarify and expand on the message Inside is trying to send elsewhere. Our journey with Inside was one where we, as the player character, frequently controlled other people to solve puzzles. This behaviour was compared to treating other people like farm animals, exploited workers, or science experiments in a tank. It was shown to be dehumanising and constricting. The very end of the game asks us to pull that perspective back one character further. Every analogy the game draws about mind-control can be applied to our control of the child and even to the concept of character control in video games in general.

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    Through Inside's eyes, it may be that video game protagonists cannot be rendered with all the humanity that protagonists in novels, films, or other media are. In the latter media, the main character can be made human through having individual agency and personhood. The actions they take in the story are not influenced by what the audience wants them to do; the protagonist makes them independently. By definition, the agency of a character ends when another person takes control of them, and during gameplay, player characters cannot make independent decisions; they are under our control. In this way the act of controlling player characters in a video game is dehumanising. Inside's sobering message is that player control may be or is even doomed to be the enemy of complete, self-motivated characters. Thanks for reading.

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    TheFlamingo352

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    Man, I never heard about that secret ending! Good write up, too, thanks for putting it up.

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    gamer_152

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    #2  Edited By gamer_152  Moderator

    @theflamingo352: Thank you. I wouldn't have known about that secret ending if it wasn't for people talking about the game online, but even weirder, I got some of the collectables in the game and didn't realise they were collectables. It was probably because there were no UI prompts or menus tracking them so I just assumed they were another part of the puzzles.

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