Inside Guide

At first glance, Inside appears to be an evolution of what Playdead did with Limbo. You play as a little boy, you solve tricky puzzles, you die in horrifying but darkly funny ways. That’s an accurate way to think of the game, but it doesn’t do justice to just how much of an evolution it is. You have to walk, jump, and grab objects in order to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. Ultimately, however, the game is about your journey through a tyrannical, unknowable, and apocalyptic world. Over the course of a few hours, you descend ever deeper into the heart of a malicious and immense construct that threatens to suffocate agency and humanity. As you progress through Inside, you experience stretches of quiet and calm punctuated by flashes of complete absurdity. The game encourages you to relish these often shocking or brutal twists, which incite feelings of revulsion and confusion. They make you want to know more.Solving puzzles can be as simple as moving a box up to the base of a high ledge in order to jump up to the top, or as complex as synchronizing multiple automatons to flip switches, lift objects, and move carts so that you can open a door. Some early puzzles rely more on cautious movement than logic as you attempt to avoid murder or abduction at the hands of masked figures. Later puzzles, on the other hand, require more patience and thought. Some make you open sequences of doors to move objects through a room, while others require delicately timed jumps or switches to complete. Inside very clearly builds upon what made Limbo great, and in fact builds something greater. Its unimaginable twist may leave you dumbfounded, confused, and quite possibly speechless, but it will fuel heated discussion with your friends about its meaning, its message, and its intentions. It’s a short ride, but one I felt compelled to take again including a search for its mysterious hidden orb collectibles.

The game is riddled with bespoke details, like knocking over a rusted refrigerator in a forest and watching leaves fly into the air, that have no gameplay relevance but exist just to add to a sense of place. For a game this beautiful and physics-driven, it's a startlingly responsive one, whose animations perfectly straddle the line between looking convincing and feeling great a rare feat. Play it soon before anyone spoils a single big moment for you. A world, broken at the hands of technological progress, decays in silence and darkness. Cowed and enslaved people shuffle mindlessly through the streets. Overseers dressed in masks and black clothes stand at the corners, waiting for one of the slaves to fall out of line, watching the soulless masses as they are forced to jump and dance. A featureless boy in the midst of it all walks through this dystopia wearing a red shirt, one of the only touches of color in this oppressive world. This is Inside, the second game from Limbo developer Playdead. Like Limbo, the gameplay is simple: you have to walk, jump, and grab objects in order to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. Ultimately, however, the game is about your journey through a tyrannical, unknowable, and apocalyptic world. Over the course of a few hours, you descend ever deeper into the heart of a malicious and immense construct that threatens to suffocate agency and humanity. Limbo followed a character moving through a strange and primitive land. Death came easily to the character, but it rarely felt like murder. Inside, on the other hand, exudes violence, cruelty, and artifice.

The game highlights the old and shattered parts of a society that you discover has been dragged into a hell of human experimentation. As you progress through Inside, you experience stretches of quiet and calm punctuated by flashes of complete absurdity. The game encourages you to relish these often shocking or brutal twists, which incite feelings of revulsion and confusion. They make you want to know more. So the world is still dark, in aesthetic and theme, but you soon discover it’s less fantastical. There’s no giant spider poised to spear the boy through the chest with one of many long limbs. Instead, his first threat is human beings in masks who drive lorries and carry torches, who might shoot him with a dart or send their dogs to savage him. Most tasks are simple but surprising, discernible from a quick look around, the knowledge that even when faced with new kinds of objects, all you’ll ever be able to do is jump and grab, with a bit of experimentation. With this deliberate design in each new puzzle and the detail in the environments, each scenario feels different from the last, like the boy is really pushing through this dystopian world rather than performing abstract tasks in front of a pretty backdrop.  As in Limbo, you’re not told how to navigate these dangers, but a little experimentation will reveal the limited interactions, usually in response to obstacles. An intro in which the boy slides down a rock face on the left teaches you to run to the right. A fallen tree encourages you to find the button for jump. A movable object beside an insurmountable barrier suggests you can push and pull and climb. Plummeting into a body of water to escape from a pack of dogs is how you learn you can swim.

Subtler signals teach you how to respond to threats. In an early sequence, the sound and subsequent sight of an approaching car triggers an acceleration in the boy’s step and breath, a beam of torchlight appears followed by an overhang with just enough time to hide beneath it, at which the boy curls up small and his breath subsides. Meticulous animation and sound design make everything feel more naturalistic, despite the fact that nobody has any discernible facial features and the boy can only travel left or right. One sharp counter to that naturalism is the high chance of repeated death and immediate resurrection, which is perhaps a discussion to be had about video games as a whole rather than just this one, but it’s particularly jarring in a psychological horror that can be experienced in one sitting. Sometimes, as in Limbo, you’ll only learn how to stay alive by first dying a horrible death, but when a scene resets, it interrupts the flow. Inside starts with a bang, with absolutely no introduction. The game loads, and there you are, a boy running through the woods. You continue running to the right, and quickly begin to realize that something isn't right here. You see humanoid figures being loaded into a truck and eventually encounter some guards. Chances are, they'll kill you- Not just kill you, but violently strangle you. You then respawn a few seconds back at a checkpoint, and the trial and error begins of what sorts of things you can possibly do differently to avoid being killed by the guard. The rest of the game more or less persists in a similar fashion. You'll be mauled to death by dogs, shot to death, fall to your death, get tasered by robots, run over by pigs, drown, and so much more while solving puzzles to keep the game going. These puzzles start simple, and initially just involve moving boxes around to get up on a platform that's a bit out of your reach. However, it won't take long before you're plugged into a mind control helmet to control these husk-like humanoid creatures, solving puzzles involving switches, levers, raising and lowering water, and loads more.

Inside is at least more forgiving than its predecessor, which delighted in tricking the player by changing the rules. The puzzles are generally less convoluted, which reflects a post-Journey trend away from challenge for challenge’s sake. Like Limbo, Inside is basically a two-button game – aside from moving left or right, all the boy can do is jump (A on the Xbox One controller) and grab (X or B) – but rather than have you repeat similar actions, it requires you to use those limited tools in a variety of ways. That grab is used at various points to drag a pig across the floor, lift a trapdoor, pull a ladder away from a ledge, pry planks from a wall and yank a generator to life. There are still a few puzzles that rely on timing, which are the most likely to frustrate, but here they feel less fiddly, and the forgiving checkpoints mean you get the boost of tension from whatever horrifying death your negligence provokes without having to go back too far. Most tasks are simple but surprising, discernible from a quick look around, the knowledge that even when faced with new kinds of objects, all you’ll ever be able to do is jump and grab, with a bit of experimentation. With this deliberate design in each new puzzle and the detail in the environments, each scenario feels different from the last, like the boy is really pushing through this dystopian world rather than performing abstract tasks in front of a pretty backdrop. Without the distraction of much skill-based challenges, the player is more able to focus on the feeling each step of the boy’s journey is designed to engender. Solving puzzles can be as simple as moving a box up to the base of a high ledge in order to jump up to the top, or as complex as synchronizing multiple automatons to flip switches, lift objects, and move carts so that you can open a door. Some early puzzles rely more on cautious movement than logic as you attempt to avoid murder or abduction at the hands of masked figures. Later puzzles, on the other hand, require more patience and thought. Some make you open sequences of doors to move objects through a room, while others require delicately timed jumps or switches to complete.