Systems: Windows, iOS, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: June 29, 2016
Publisher: Playdead
Developer: Playdead
Time Spent: ~5-6 Hours
I played INSIDE over the course of about 24 hours. The first night I played from around 12 am until roughly 3:30 am, both a testament to the game itself and the battery longevity of the Switch OLED; and even then it was only down to about 15%. That next afternoon, I played for a couple of hours (after a brief look-up on how to solve a particular puzzle because I again was overthinking every element of the puzzle except the obvious solution) and then finished it later that evening. I was a little confused about the meaning of the ending, of which I have since learned that there are two, but I agree with the general consensus of what everything led to and what it meant.
Just a brief warning, the game does involve a child being put into deadly situations not dissimilar to Playdead's first game LIMBO, but less fantastical and more realistically dystopian where giant spiders are replaced by packs of guard dogs and automated machines akin to the Sentinels from The Matrix if they were attached to tracks and rails. I had suggested to Conklederp that it probably wasn't a great game to watch me play since I am not a pro gamer and there were plenty of times where the boy character was killed over a dozen different ways. While I will not be showing screenshots of the character dying, it will be brought up to a degree as part of game mechanics and the like. So just a heads up that if that's not something you want to read about, then there are obviously no hard feelings there.
INSIDE feels like the natural evolution from LIMBO, where you played an unnamed boy looking for his lost sister, here, you play as an unnamed boy running from various antagonists straight out of an episode of The X-Files. Like LIMBO, you also start out in a forest solving minor environmental puzzles that only require you to move and jump, and pretty early on, the threat comes not from the sides like a typical side-scrolling platformer, but from the background as men with flashlights and guns exit cars and patrol the surrounding woods looking for you. Why they are looking for you is the primary crux for nearly the first half of the game as you run through various environments like woods, highway offramps, cornfields, pig farms, and eventually to industrial areas filled with your first big jump in puzzle mechanics.
Once you reach this section of the game, you start controlling other human-like creatures called husks (more on them later) through the use of a psychic-like helmet that lets you either move them left or right, or they follow you. At this point, the puzzles become a bit more complex because not only are you moving around the characters and making sure that they stay out of danger, but you also now have other people to think about and how they interact with the environment. After this section (which includes the one puzzle I had to look up, although it did not involve the husks) you continue through the industrial-like area although it takes on a more scientific-lab-like appearance and there is a lot of water.
The water stages are where the story starts to get really strange and where I lost the thread of the plot until I finished the game and looked up what actually happened. Thankfully, these areas were not as problematic as your stereotypical water stage and were actually quite fun. There was a fair amount of "figure it out as you go," but since there were so few buttons that actually functioned in the game, determining how a submersible worked and its additional functions was quite easy. There were a couple of sections that required significant amounts of dying to figure out how I was supposed to solve particular puzzles how a black-haired swimming creature moved and how I was supposed to manipulate the environment to block their path.
The last quarter of the game is really where things kind of went off rails, or at least what I thought I understood what actually consisted of the rails in this game. Without getting too heavy into spoilers (and because I didn't take too many pictures specifically to avoid spoilers). Most of these areas were in a lab-type setting which I was thankful to actually be in after the water levels and the water-based puzzles which often required a different type of problem-solving process than the first half of the game. It was here that I felt pretty confused and just pushed forward, solving puzzles not because I understood what was going on, but because I thought maybe I might have a better understanding at some later point. But, there were a lot of very cool set pieces that I don't think I have experienced before in a game, even if the avenue was some of the strangest I have played and seen.
Then the game ended. When I looked up the different interpretations of the story, I nodded along thinking, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense." Then I saw that there was an alternate ending, which again, kind of made sense. But what are these orbs that everyone is talking about? I don't recall ever collecting, let alone seeing anything that could have been described as an orb that could have been collected. And after watching the first minute of a video, I know for certain that I never collected or interacted with anything that looked like that. Scratch that, I did find the fourth orb but must have forgotten about it because nothing immediately came from doing whatever interacting with the orb did. And while I do enjoy alternate or hidden endings, I think I feel a little miffed/bitter because of how well hidden these orbs were and that you needed to collect all of them in a single playthrough to see something potentially integral to fully understanding the full story.
Taking INSIDE without the stupidly-well-hidden alternate ending, I really did enjoy the game and think it's a great follow-up to LIMBO without feeling that Playdead is a one-trick pony and I still don't fully understand how/why Polygon could put both of these games together and say that they're "essentially the same experience." That would be like saying that Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 are "essentially the same experience" because in both games you play as a plumber in a platformer as you rescue a princess from a large cow-like turtle crime boss. LIMBO might be easier to stomach for some people who would rather not watch a more realistic-looking child be killed in dozens of ways over and over (because I'm a bad gamer), but I enjoyed the storytelling in INSIDE a lot more.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. Oh, and the game played wonderfully on the Switch, with zero crashes, and no noticeable frame rate drops. I was actually pretty surprised and how smoothly everything ran and looked during the entire game. Just wanted to throw that out there for people who are looking at various platforms.
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