The first 10 minutes of Inside, the long-awaited Limbo follow-up from developer Playdead, swing between being beautiful, haunting, and terrifying. Sometimes it is all three at the exact same time. From there, it adds intrigue, wonder, and shock on top of those and never lets up. For that reason, it’s best if you take my word for it and go in completely blind to discover it for yourself. But if you need to be convinced, keep reading for more on this visually stunning, thought-provoking, and mysterious masterpiece.
Even though it is mechanically a 2D puzzle-platformer, Inside is quite simply one of the most beautiful and subtly detailed games I’ve ever played. Every frame appears to have been meticulously crafted and polished several times over, from dust particles hovering in smoky air to raindrops splashing down in a bog to golden sunlight beaming onto your unnamed, red-shirted boy avatar through a window. Everything appears to have had an artist’s full and undivided attention. I often stopped just to admire my surroundings, taking in the subtly detailed animations, moody lighting, boldly contrasting color palette, and even the eerily unsettling sound design. You can hear the boy breathing hard after he’s been running for a while. You can see him stumble after he jumps and sticks a running landing. Gray paints a lot of the scenery, but splashes of color – often red – are used as a bold contrast that draws your eye where the designers want it to go. Camera work is also laudable; the perspective only ever shifts slightly, but from scene to scene you’re always in the optimal viewing position for what’s happening on screen, and there’s always a visual reward anytime the camera moves closer in, pulls further out, or changes angle.
Inside’s gameplay is similar to Limbo’s simple but atmospheric 2D puzzle-platforming. Deaths are frequent and can seem unavoidable and unfair at first, but they’re actually lessons that teach you both what to do and what not to do. Something has to, because there are (refreshingly) no on-screen or spoken instructions whatsoever. And when you die, the animations of the boy’s demise are so varied and at times over the top as to be entertaining – and sometimes unnerving. Watching him get zapped and dragged off screen by an electronic tentacle or blasted to oblivion adds some levity to balance out the understated maulings and gunshots. Checkpoints, meanwhile, are liberal enough and load times are brief enough that death never feels like a penalty.
Like in Limbo, your only buttons are jump (A) and interact (X) (or up and Right Ctrl by default on PC, with the arrow keys handling movement), with subtle cues of hue or light directing your attention to where it needs to go. The puzzles themselves are a bit easier than those in Limbo – I never got hung up for more than a few minutes before having one of those gratifying puzzle-solving epiphanies. Some involve moving select objects, like boxes. Others see you activating odd air-propelled cubes that soar into the air and hover for a moment before returning to the ground and resetting. And there are several more that would be spoilery to discuss, but they add up to a good variety. Occasionally those are blended, necessitating experimentation with physics in order to get the angles just right. The complex itself is sometimes your opponent, be it great heights, unexplained concussion blasts, or deep water you’ll have to dive deep into without drowning.
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