‘Inside,’ Successor to Indie Hit ‘Limbo,’ Is a Disturbing Masterpiece
So here you are again – a boy, alone in the woods. There’s no explanation, no backstory, no words at all, in fact: just a place that feels as deep as it is deadly. You move, in the greatest of video game traditions, from left to right. But even your first tentative steps in that direction quietly evoke a half-forgotten childhood nightmare, shrouded in mist and shadow. And in no time at all, when you’re not hiding or running along the very edge of death pursued by lights, you die.
It’s been some six years since Danish indie, Playdead, gave us the creepily effective Limbo, where an unnamed child wanders a hostile, otherworldly forest in search of his sister. That game strongly evoked the 1991 French-developed classic, Another World, with its equally atmospheric setting and opaque story and puzzles. Playdead has been working on Inside from almost the moment it shipped Limbo, and has somehow created an experience for which the term “puzzle platformer” is even less adequate. But, for all Inside’s similarities to its predecessor (and there are many), it stands completely apart as a mini masterpiece, not least in how – during its relatively short playtime – it slowly changes the way you see the world outside it.
The world inside is both familiar and alienating. You see faceless men caught in the dazzling headlights, looking uncannily out-of-place in the dawn-grey forest. They chase you, shooting something dart-like and deadly. Later, whirring machines taser you on sight with umbilical, curling wires. But this is the kind of world where everything might kill you. And even what seem to be lifelines – the scattered cones of light that dot your path – turn sinister.
As do the soundscapes. Inside gives you a distinct tell for every enemy and transmits it directly to your nerves, exploiting that terrifying fraction-of-a-second between hearing something and seeing it. But what’s startling is how quickly those otherwise ordinary sounds become triggers, no less disturbing for how mundane they are in any other context. Take the yapping of the dogs that home in on you. After the first time you’re caught, and hear the crack of your adolescent neck in their jaws or glumly watch them tearing your tiny limbs into delicate red ribbons, you never want to hear a dog again. Even the music grows out of what threatens you, an electronic pulse that guides your timing – or pre-announces the consequences of your miscalculation.
So where Limbo felt like a rogue fairytale, Inside is both darker and far closer to home. As you journey from the forest into an ever more claustrophobic world, the narrative sinks in by stealth. While hiding, scrambling, solving puzzles – nearly every one is a quiet triumph – the details you’re not focusing on infect your imagination. Those faceless men in the distance, the deserted, near derelict buildings, the strange, blinking machines, or even just an overturned chair add up to more than growing unease. There’s a story here that you discover by surviving in it – one of a blandly industrialized horror where familiar objects take new shapes.