Inside: the Review

I jumped in the water headfirst and began to swim as fast as I could. I could see the creature coming, but I was almost there. My head broke the surface, I reached up, just grasping the edge of the platform when it caught up. I had to watch hopelessly as my child-like avatar was once again pulled under the surface and eviscerated by this watery fiend.

This is how you learn to survive Inside, the newest addition to developer Playdead’s library. Inside is in every way, a refinement on Limbo — the platforming masterpiece that was Playdead’s first game.

Like Limbo before it, Inside is a straightforward puzzle-platformer requiring precise timing and jumps to find secrets and survive in a 2D, desaturated, dystopian world. In true Playdead style, any lapses in judgement or timing result in a myriad of gruesome deaths for your character. While nothing approached the level of my spider and bear trap deaths from Limbo, each of my numerous deaths confirmed time and time again just how visceral the game could be.

Your journey through Inside begins abruptly. No explanation is given to who you are, why you are here, or what is happening. Players will not find hidden diaries or recordings, there are no dialogue trees to explore; your avatar in this world, a young boy, is never even named. This is a game that treats players’ intelligence with respect and expects them to draw their own conclusions.

From the first moment after the title screen, Inside is an egregiously linear game; progression is generally as simple as moving as far right as possible. Puzzles crop up throughout the journey, with each one different and varied enough to never grow tiresome. The puzzles are meticulously crafted to give players every opportunity to find a solution. Often, if I felt stuck, I just had to take a minute and look around the level — generally I was just overthinking the solution.

Puzzles form the strong backbone by which Inside carries itself. Without a significant delay or a deliberately slow pace, players will easily spend less than 10 hours in this world — I myself barely topped the five hour mark on my first and only playthrough despite finding all secrets and collectables. There were no major challenges that delayed me, and the gameplay was straightforward enough that I never had to learn how to play the game.

Gameplay, however, is not the main focus here. Playdead’s plan is to build a world, pull you in, and leave you wondering at their world-building finesse. Inside’s world and story will leave you confused and questioning and that is just what the developers want. This is a game that raises more questions than it could ever answer, and players are expected to be okay with that.

Inside has very little in the way of overt storytelling, instead players are asked to draw conclusions of their own. Just like Limbo, the ending here is exceedingly vague, forcing players to rethink everything they encountered in the hours before the credits. A secret ending, unlocked by finding all the scattered collectables, only serves to subvert the world you’ve been inhabiting even further until you can’t even be sure why you played the game in the first place.

I have found it rare, in recent years, to find a game I can complete in an evening or weekend — rarer still a game I genuinely can enjoy in that time. Inside may not be a hard game, or one that reimagines the platforming genre, and that is entirely fine. Inside made me experiment, it made me question things, and it made me think more than any game in recent memory. I spent a scant few hours inside of this murderous, somber world, but it has been days now and I am still ruminating over every minute of my experience.