Indie Game of the Week 378: Inmost

Summertime, when we aren't melting in our seats, is a period of relaxation and good vibes so to keep things in that spirit of sunny lightness here's a monochrome game about pain, loss, and crushing depression. Lithuanian studio Hidden Layer Games's Inmost is a 2D pixel art puzzle-platformer that, rather than heavily invest in tough platforming sequences or acquiring traversal upgrades or pretending to be a Souls game like the rest of its peers, is more about gradually making your way across a grim world full of traps and instant-death monster attacks using the environment and some modest movement controls to keep out of harm's way. In terms of gameplay, from the deliberate sense of the movement from the more cerebral approach to overcoming obstacles, Inmost reminds me most of those older Eric Chahi adventure games like Another World and Heart of Darkness, the latter especially in its goopy, ink-black enemies that can appear quite suddenly and move unexpectedly fast. The pixel look obfuscates, by design, a lot of traps and hidden passages that might lead to the next item you need to continue on your path—a pickaxe, a knife, a scythe, or a key, perhaps—or otherwise lead to collectibles.

Inmost spends most of its time with a bearded gent that is scouring a grim fairytale world of monsters and magical towers in pursuit of someone or something, while the action occasionally switches to two other characters: a knight in that same grim world, and a lonely little girl in a much more grounded setting of a suburban home. The two other "modes", which the game will occasionally drop in on once you've made notable progress as the gentleman, takes the two aspects of the core game then separates and emphasizes them: the knight is very capable of fighting the monsters you've been having to avoid or trick into killing themselves as the gent, fighting his way through gauntlets of these tough, fast black slime enemies, while the defenseless girl entirely focuses on the adventure game side of things as you dig into the mysteries of the old house her family resides in and the strained relationship she has with her father and mother, the former largely absent due to work and the latter oddly hostile towards her. You can tell from the game's tone that neither of the three stories are heading anywhere good so the question becomes instead how the three might be linked. I'll say the triple story threads do come to a satisfying united conclusion but it's a slow-burn of a metaphor-laden narrative, more so given how much time you spend wordlessly exploring as the gent between updates with the other two, and makes for a withholding tale that won't be showing its cards until the final reveal.

So, what I didn't quite anticipate is how much of the game involves exploring a singular large map and collecting items with which you can then backtrack to earlier areas for new places to check out. I wasn't being facetious earlier about how the game isn't really going for an explormer vibe (kind of a big shift for me) and yet there's still a lot of that in here. It's still a mostly linear game but then that's usually true of explormers also: each upgrade opening up an intended route to the next upgrade or pivotal boss encounter while also incidentally providing a batch of dead-ends and shortcuts. There's no combat outside of the knight chapters: you can only defeat foes as the gent by tricking them into leaping off a cliff or into a death trap that you've probably already triggered once yourself. That side of things, and the monochrome nature, is reminiscent of Playdead games like Limbo but the map is also very detailed and interconnected in a micro sense with many shortcuts to open and any blank area probably being a secret room you can only access from a specific angle. The two types of collectibles involve notes that don't offer any written lore (the game does have plenty of written and spoken language though, including voiceover for the knight chapters and plenty of text dialogue for the little girl and a stuffed rabbit she takes a liking to) but are meaningful in other ways, while the other is a series of 85 gemstones that can be found in chests or from jumping around a specific spot and making them appear. The latter gives off a faint audio cue to make them easier to find but I still finished the game with 78 out of 85 of them so they weren't always obviously placed. That the game later reveals that these gems are actually crystallized pain and suffering is pretty on-brand for the vibe it's going for.

I wasn't sure what to make of the controls at first but since I've played a few of these cinematic platformers in the past I figured out what it was going for quickly enough; I just wasn't used to seeing that deliberate format done in a pixel style that more closely resembles a flightier 16-bit platformer. The puzzles are satisfying to complete, if a bit busywork-focused, and likewise the enemy encounters and figuring out how to elude or defeat them without any offensive options made for some suspenseful and rewarding sequences. I'm not sure I'd call Inmost a horror game per se but some of those sequences definitely put that thematic genre in mind: I could probably draw a comparison with Metroid Fusion or Dread and the few times it has you escaping an unbeatable foe. If the pixel graphics are a bit primitive the game makes up for it with some dramatic lighting and other visual effects and the music is appropriately morose for the subject matter, so no complaints about the presentation. Honestly, the only problem I had was that the movement can be a bit stiff and awkward when jumping, the game sometimes not understanding whether you wanted to do a big leap off the side of a platform or a gentle hop to get closer to the edge, and that the Itch.io version I played—as has often been my experience for games on Itch—seemed less stable than others, with a few major graphical glitches here and there.

Also, and this probably goes without saying, the game has a few content warnings that might be prudent to observe including scenes of violence, suicide, abuse, and bullying: you get a pretty good sense from that list for what you might be in for, so if you're fine with getting bummed out by a video game by all means should you give this one a try. It's a very methodical and thoughtful game from its mechanics to its narrative decisions and a bit more involved than its simple pixel art style might suggest.

Rating: 4 out of 5.