Now Playing: INSIDE

Indie developer Playdead’s successor to LIMBO follows in a very similar vein to that monochrome puzzle/platformer. You play as a young boy in a strange place, but instead of this being the afterlife, it’s a rather more bleak reality, in which grown-ups and dogs are chasing you, people are being herded into trucks and then… well, I don’t want to spoil it. I had no idea what the game was about going into it and that’s the best way to experience it. It’s 3 – 4 hours of absolute magnificence, going from rural forests, through farms to factories and beyond. It’s haunting, evocative, moody, the soundtrack/soundscape is incredible. It’s genuinely the most strikingly beautiful game I think I’ve ever seen. Forget Unreal Engine, this is absolute art.

There are some stealth sections but they’re basic and just a matter of timing.

As in most puzzle-platformers, you generally walk from left to right on a 2D plane, but INSIDE uses 3D graphics to build its world and uses that extra depth to great effect, often using the background as the source of a pursuer or showing some important information or storytelling. Like LIMBO before it, the controls are very simple but very intuitive and tactile. You learn through play and experimentation, with no dialogue, cutscenes, tutorials, on-screen prompts or anything else to take you out of its world. The game doesn’t linger on any particular puzzle mechanic for long, it doesn’t drag an idea out to breaking point. It teaches you what you can do and then gradually changes things up. There is a little trial-and-error, learning through dying and repeating sections in the style of games like Another World, but these usually give you some warning and there’s no real punishment for getting killed.

So much of the story is told through the environment. These outskirts remind me of Half-Life 2. Bleak, unsettling and mysterious.

To say the game gets kinda weird at the end would be an understatement… but it’s so, so good. You really just have to play it without any preconception, preferably with the lights off and headphones on. Playdead have a style and formula that has me hooked, and I will definitely be checking out whatever they come up with next. INSIDE may just be the best game I have played this year.

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