Inside
Brought to us by Playdead, the same indie studio that gave us Limbo, 2016’s Inside is a puzzle-platformer adventure game. The art is beautiful, the puzzles are creative, and the game strikes a perfect balance between challenge and reward. The first thing you might notice about Inside is the lack of any HUD (heads-up display), which usually provides players with a visual representation of game status. There’s no onboarding, tutorials, or training. While the game’s lack of a HUD might make you wonder why it’s worth covering here, the truth is that Inside’s lack of conventional interface components actually serves to make the player experience even stronger.
Inside begins by dropping you, a small and nameless boy, into a dark and ominous forest. There is no introduction, no hints, no keypad customization. You are taken immediately to the game’s world, completely immersed from the second you start. One could argue that this lack of interface or game status means the game would need to compensate with comprehensive onboarding or training for the player in the form of training or tutorials. Rather, the game relies on intuitive input controls. With the limited controls the game provides (general front, back, and jump movements, along with a single interaction button), this is a rare case where it could be argued that initial training is not necessary. The developers made the assumption that this isn’t going to be a player’s first game. Since this is an indie game, I’d argue that that’s a safe assumption. By cutting out unnecessary introductions, Playdead is catering to their target audience and rewards them with immediate immersion into the game’s world. With such intuitive controls, new players can easily jump into the game; if they have to, they can enter the menu to view the controls, customize if necessary, and exit. This suggests that the user will only need to enter this menu once since the controls are so simplistic — if they need to open it at all.
The rest of Inside’s mechanics you learn as you go: the patterns, the puzzles, and how far you can push. No immediately visible indicators are given to interactive objects, it’s up to the player to figure out what can be picked up, what switches turned on, and other game interactions. Through familiar interactive objects and gameplay behavior, this consistency helps guide the user as they explore the different stages so that they’re never truly lost in a puzzle. While most games are too afraid to go down this route, Inside shines because its simplicity paves the way for more complete immersion, which helps support the vivid plot.
This trend of removing UI cues isn’t limited to Inside. In the wider design community, it’s been interesting to see designers opt to get rid of standard user interfaces in an attempt to remove distractions for their users. You can see this in the form of chat bots or Amazon Dash buttons, which minimize UI to make for more streamlined user experiences, as Google Product Director Luke Wroblewski demonstrated in a recent illustration:
Getting users or players straight to their objective without having to wade through an interface or other possible distractions (like game status, for instance) is a trend I hope to see more in games and designs alike.
Inside uses its simple controls and its minimal HUD to let the player focus on what’s most important in the game: the story, the art, and puzzles. It’s a strong example of how much designers can achieve by knowing their target audience and minimizing their reliance on menus — no matter how risky of a prospect that might seem.
Thanks to Joshua Calixto for editing this piece!
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