Inside: Sneaking In

Time to Beat: 4 Hours, 32 Minutes

Nine years ago I enjoyed playing Limbo. Eight years later I finally played the developer's successor game.

Playdead's 2016 Inside begins with a faceless child tumbling down a rocky slope in the dark, the title splashed across the screen in large red letters. Playing from the perspective of the child, the player receives not a single instruction, a line of text, or a spoken word. They must decipher the world from experience and intuition.

What they see is a child, pale skinned, dark hair, black pants, a blank face, and wearing a shirt that appears gray in poor light, but red when illuminated. The only option is to move to the right. The protagonist travels through the woods, hiding from adults in trucks. Who are the adults and what do they want? They are moving something in semi-trailer trucks. MaybeInside is about kids vs adults? Hiding and fleeing are the only tools to survive. Hide behind rocks, in small alcoves, and in ditches. Why? Because if the adults see you, they will kill you. You are being hunted. Then they set the dogs on you. I died, again and again, brutally. When the dogs catch the boy, they tear at him, then snap his neck as blood pools around his innocent body. A man chased me, cut me off, and shot me. I fell into a puddle of water, reaching out for help as I died. Inside is brutal, horrific, and emotional, but not graphic.

Early on the boy avoids death by hiding or running. Every occasion has only one correct answer, though sometimes this is a multi-step process like, hide, then run. Running looks easy, but it requires precise timing to make jumps, hide successfully, or dodge obstacles. Inside also includes puzzles without tension, without deadly threats. The first half hour teaches introductory skills like grabbing objects to pull or push them. These help the child climb barb wire fences, high brick walls, or leap from a cliff into water.

Inside's contrast between dark and light fosters feelings of suspense and dread. It combines with fog and shadow to highlight another level of immersion. The adults use light to search; flashlights, headlights, and searchlights. The way they cut through darkness and fog is wonderful, until you remember they are the tools of your pursuers. Inside is a world of gray, nearly devoid of color. The rare sources are the protagonist's shirt, chickens, blood, and buttons. The rest is a spectrum from white, to shades of gray, to black. Even white and pure black are rare. Dark gray is the predominant color of scene and setting. It feels oppressive, but also capable of aiding your escape.

It's difficult to believe, but Inside is a side-scrolling game. Ninety percent of the time, the player can only move to the right. On rare occasions they are allowed to move down, up, or left. The boy never enters the background. Playdead uses the background to bring Inside to life. The background is mostly empty, and very distant, creating a grand scale of events. It might show the mountains far away. Or the black darkness of the distant wall in an abandoned warehouse. Sometimes there is movement, like a distant search party, or the movement of trucks. And sometimes these objects invade the foreground, the realm of the protagonist. It's a car driving out of the darkness, its headlights flaring, or a dog, loosed by a distant search party, running in to maul the boy. A final characteristic of the background is its emptiness. It is vast, and there is nothing in it. This is often true of the foreground as well. Most areas are devoid of animals, humans or otherwise. This is contrasted with a few exceptions, like the hunters, and the chickens mentioned previously. Inside is a mostly empty world, full of threats. For the protagonist, it is a lonely world.

Eventually the child sees adults being rounded up into the semi-trailer trucks. He moves from forest, to cornfield, to farmland which transitions into abandoned industrial zones, and to the slums of a rundown city. Having escaped his pursuers in the cornfield, he greets pigs in the farm. They appear to be infested by giant worms. Pulling them out solves a puzzle (yuk!). In the industrial area, the child encounters a handful of adults kneeling or standing but slumped over. These listless adults are near a strange glowing helmet, attached to the ceiling by a cord. Putting on the helmet allows the protagonist to control the Listless. If the player walks to the left, the Listless walk left, if the player walks right, the Listless walk right, and if the player jumps, you get the idea. This is a key mechanic for solving future puzzles. In one puzzle the player plays as the boy, who controls an adult, who controls another adult. Entering the city the boy climbs upward to avoid detection. He observes from the rooftops, as Listless march in lines.

By this point the player will have found, or missed, about a half dozen large black metal balls with glowing green and white spots. There are fourteen in total. At each one the player must pull out a plug stuck into it. If the player disables all of them, Inside rewards the player with a brief secret ending (I watched it on YouTube after beating the game). I found six of the metal balls, and located one that I couldn't reach. There doesn't appear to be a method of checking how many you've located. My advice, which can't be very good since I only found a third of the secrets, is to always check to see if you can move to the left. Even then, puzzles may frustrate collectors.

Aside from the puzzles that involve escaping dogs (these require precise timing and practice), most puzzles don't threaten the child with imminent death. For each puzzle, carefully consider what you can see. Admittedly, checking the terrain carefully when a murderous dog is chasing you is difficult. While the child can die, the player can't put the puzzle in a state that can't be beaten. My best advice for puzzles is twofold. One, keep trying. Two, if I've made puzzles sound simpler than they are, it's because they generally have a solution that is easy to implement, but requires out of the box thinking.

As the child continues through the rundown city they descend from the rooftops. Accidentally they end up in a line of Listless. They are forced to walk in rhythm with the Listless, performing menial tasks like jumping on command. Failure results in a brutal tasering by machines.

Eventually escaping the line, the child enters a city area flooded with water. Here the player learns to swim. The child can only spend a limited amount of time underwater. At first they are fine. Then they start to gasp. The emotion conveyed by the struggling child is overwhelming. Watching him almost drown is agonizing. He only drowned once, but I felt terrible. If the player surfaces by the third gasp, the child recovers.