Inside Review: Its Horrific Beauty Will Shock and Enamour You

Inside is a strange, shocking, and at times a horrifying experience. Yet it lends a sense of wonder, magic and absolute beauty to the player, one which is rare to experience in a videogame. It builds on its predecessor, Limbo, in almost every way but that’s not to say that it strays from its roots. It is very much a sequel to Limbo in all but name and story. Limbo’s silhouetted, monochrome painted world is replaced with an oppressive Orwellian cityscape, clad with futuristic structures and plenty of threats for the player to avoid. You are a child who is on the run from a mysterious, faceless conglomerate, who have enslaved humans and are experimenting on them. Inside gives you very little tools to progress other than jumping, grabbing and hiding. Vulnerability is thus at the very heart of this game’s charm.

You are not the Doom Marine who carries 10 guns and can rip a demon’s head clean off. The game starts with your weak, pale faced child plonked into the twilight of a forest. Flashlights and search beams are what you must avoid as so not to be captured by your pursuers. I think Inside was the first game in which I died by falling over a tree root. There are simple, stealth sections and some tense, tight chase sequences against vicious hounds who will rip your character apart if caught, all of which add to your feeling of helplessness.

A key difference to highlight between Limbo and Inside is the brutality of the death animations. When you died in Limbo it was brutal but it felt quite detached from reality due to the comic book-like nature of the art style. Inside’s more realistic graphics allows for far more shocking deaths. Your avatar is a child and seeing him being gunned down, chewed up by dogs or blown up is heart wrenching. The animations of these death sequences are extremely well done as well. The child’s body does not simply fall into ragdoll-physics crumple upon death like we see in many games of this ilk, such as in Limbo. The child will struggle as he’s being eaten alive, he will gasp and stretch out for air when drowning. These little details are what make Inside such a beautiful and horrific game, one that keeps you guessing and repeatedly shocks the player.

Playdead’s ability to tell a story visually is sadly more of a rare thing than it should be in visual media and something that really stands out in Inside. There is no text or voice over that tells us of the trepid past of your character or how his world became like it is. If we look at how AAA releases from this year tell a story, it is usually through a radio voice over (The Division, Doom, Tomb Raider to name a few) or in a cut scene. Inside allows the player to see, explore and make their mind up for themselves as to what has happened to cause this dystopia. We are never told why the player is running away from those people. Maybe they are simply trying to bring him back to his family and the whole game is a child’s daydream? The short game serves up many questions, all of which add to the immersion and mystery of its world and although some may find the lack of closure a little underwhelming, most will be drawn in by its furtive nature.

The same lack of handholding applies to the mechanics of the game. Its rudimental control scheme (A to jump, left thumbstick to move, X to grab onto things) is never told to you, you have to work it out for yourself. You are never explicitly told where to go, what to do or how to do it. In a side-scroller this may seem obvious. Years of playing Mario and Donkey Kong have taught us to go right until the end of the level and this is true for Inside. However, the world seems so much bigger and robust than any traditional side-scroller even though it is essentially just that. Inside’s design flows so naturally, using sound, light and extremely subtle colour cues that means that you never feel stuck, however difficult a situation may seem at first.

There is a certain verticality to the world which both lends a sense claustrophobia and freedom, especially in the underwater sections of the game which see you diving to the depths of the ocean and exploring forgotten ships and sunken facilities. I won’t get into how the player experiences this underwater freedom as it may spoil a few unlikely mechanics of the game but rest assured it keeps in tone with the magic of the game. As you progress and slowly get to grips with Inside, it bestows more and more power and strength onto you in a rewarding way, all of which comes to a crescendo in its finale which again I will not spoil.

At its heart Inside is essentially a 2-D side-scrolling, puzzle platformer, but it is so much more than that. The story flows in such a way that you are constantly intrigued as to where it could lead you next but at the same time unnerved at what it shows you to; be it to a long haired mermaid chase, black-clad secret service types hunting you or the plethora of zombie like humans who you use and abuse to progress through the game. The horror aside, the game never fails to bring you moments of beauty, be it a beach side landscape or the expanse of the its vast ocean. Inside’s simple, efficient and wonderful world will shock, confuse and leave you wondering what happened but all in a gorgeous and poignant way. If you have a spare couple of hours and want to experience what for me is my favourite game of the year so far, give Inside a try.