Inside

 
Developer: Playdead
Steam Release: Jul 2016
Hours Played: 5.1
Similar To: Black The Fall / Deadlight / Limbo / Little Nightmares / Toby: The Secret Mine
Rating: 5/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY

As the sequel to the ever-popular title that spawned hundreds of pretenders and put the good name back into the ol' platform puzzler genre, it was never in doubt that Inside was going to hit my Top 200 list. Bearing all the hallmarks that gave rise to Limbo's success, Inside utilizes the winning formula of old and brings us that juicy cocktail of innovative level-design, the eerily peculiar and the downright bizarre that we've come to know and love. As in Limbo you are a young boy, endowed with a strange running style, thrown into a highly hostile and sinister dystopian world. Your life, as ever, hangs in the balance at every turn where death is always brutal and violently explicit. True to form, apart from left, right and jump your only other action is the... er, well, action button where you'll push, pull, turn, climb, click or twiddle your way to freedom.

BALANCE & PACE

This time round, we're talking a 2.5 platformer that is similar in appearance to, and plays not unlike, Deadlight by Tequila Works. Only here, the emphasis is very much based around solving puzzles with not a single shot being fired. You'll face all manner of challenges from the simple - involving the pushing and pulling of boxes to the swinging on and off of chains - to the hiding-in-the-shadows-from-the light routine; right up to elaborate mind-control sequences where you clamp your head to a metallic helmet. Rest assured, within the 66 short chapters on offer you'll get a huge variety of ingenious conundrums - all inventive and fresh in their own right, that'll constantly have your grey matter working overtime. In addition, you'll face-palm and kick yourself for your own stupidity everytime you'll resort to the odd peak at the walkthrough.    

PRESENTATION & DESIGN 

As usual checkpoints are invisible and unobtrusive but utilized with common sense in mind; a death will automatically shift you back in time at the exact point where you would want to start that section again. There is zero time-wasting here. Apart from the outdoor moments in the earlier part of the game when sunlight occasionally streaks in, the locations themselves are generally very dark especially the underwater sequences. However visuals are always clear and clean with sound-effects being kept to a minimum. Menace, danger and intrigue haunts the entire atmosphere of the game and while it's clear an experiment with obvious exploitation is occurring you're never entirely sure exactly what's going on. However, with guards not thinking twice before bringing about such violent deaths to a child, it's probably ultimately for evil ends.    
  

PROGRESS SYSTEM

Like Limbo, the developers continue with the less-is-more doctrine when it comes to immersing the player. Apart from the main home-page and a screen where you can load previously played chapters, there are absolutely no other menus included. Apart from secret pods to collect - a feature that can be easily overlooked by the player - there is no score, no speed-running option, no stars to collect and no leaderboard of any kind. As such progress can only really be measured by visiting the load-game screen and noting the 66 red dots (chapters) that run along the bottom of the screen - with lighted dots indicating completed chapters.The chapters themselves can be ticked off fairly quickly and it personally took me just over 5 hours to complete (with about half a dozen peaks at a walkthrough). 

CONCLUSION

Questions abound in Inside: (1) Why is the boy alive and free in the first place? (2) Why are there strange long-haired baby-trolls lurking in the water? (3) Why does he suddenly have an underwater breathing skill? (4) What's with the odd change in gravity?..and so on. Personally, I'd rather engage in mental gymnastics by getting the lad from A to B rather than by trying to figure out the indecipherable plot. That it is set in some kind of post-apocalyptic world a la Deadlight or Half-Life and that events get ever more peculiar as you delve deeper into the facility is all you need to know. That the game makes me feel like a boss when I work out tricky parts of the game is something that matters more and marks a game out as great for me. For a superb surreal experience that gets you gripped from start to finish you can do a lot worse than getting inside Inside.