For random reasons I won’t bore you with, I started Playdead’s 2016 game Inside last night. Tonight I finished it. Yeah, it’s a short game.

But holy smokes is it ever good. Since the game is almost 10 years old I won’t worry too much about spoilers, but first a bit of spoiler-free setup. I’ll warn you before I start on the specifics.

So at its most basic Inside is a combat-free side scroller. You play a young boy who is running (generally) left to right across the screen, avoiding being detected by enemies and solving some environmental puzzles to proceed. The puzzles were perfect for me (I am NOT a puzzle person). Difficult enough to make me feel satisfied at figuring them out, but not so difficult that I got frustrated.

As far as the story goes, not much is explained. There are men and dogs hunting for this boy though you’re never told why. But these same men are rounding up other people and turning them into mindless automatons, again for unknown reasons. Although there is no out-going combat (ie, you have no weapons or combat moves) your pursuers will kill you viciously. It can be quite disturbing when you get caught; seeing this little boy getting torn up by dogs, choked to death by men, or just getting blown into little bits. It’s a lot.

You start in the woods but soon enter some kind of complex where they seem to be doing experiments on the people they’ve rounded up.

OK let’s start getting into spoiler territory but I kind of rather you stop reading and go play it if you haven’t. It only takes 3-4 hours to play through.

Assuming that’s not your thing, let’s continue.

So I was having fun figuring out how to sneak past spotlights and fool guard dogs. Then something attacked me in the water; something not-natural. This aquatic humanoid thing. It was tough to get away from that thing. Then I found a ‘cap’ that would let me control these mindless human drones, assuming I could set them free. Basically they copy whatever you do. So maybe there’s a door too heavy to life until you have a few zombie friends who will help. You can also trick them into walking off a high ledge, and then you can jump down on them using them as an organic cushion to break your fall. Or get them to throw you over gaps you can’t jump across.

That’s how things sat for a while. Weird but, y’know, manageable. You’re climbing, swimming through water, jumping, throwing switches, dragging crates etc. At the top of the post is you near the start of the game. Walk in the woods. Totally normal.

And then you come into areas where water flows across the ceiling rather than across the floor and sometimes you have to climb up and jump up into the water and swim over obstacles. OK, I can adapt to that, but it’s pretty out there. And then you get to the heart of the experiment which seems to be some plan to merge people into a ball of biomass, maybe to power something? Again it isn’t clear. You try to shut this down, but you get sucked into this mass, and for the last part of the game you’re this large flesh bubble with legs and arms sticking out all over the place. And that, my friends, was a trip. That was some WEIRD shit as first thing I had to do was learn how to move all over again. (You kind of roll-walk and you can squeeze through small opening, or just use your bulk to smash through some obstacles.)

I mean it was cool and fun, but also gross and just so damned weird…

My only real complaint is the ending, because there kind of isn’t one. You finally escape, as a big bag of flesh, and roll down a mountainside, coming to rest near a body of water. And you can’t move for a few minutes. Then the credits roll. I guess we’re meant to interpret this in our own way. But aside from that, as someone who SUCKs at side-scrollers, I’d still recommend this. 9 years after launch. Me with my finger on the pulse of modern gaming!

[Not sure why my images came out so grainy… these are both taken on the Xbox in HDR mode. For some reason the Xbox wouldn’t sync to my OneDrive so I uploaded them to Google Photos from my phone. But then they were super dark. So I let google “adjust” them and I guess that’s where the grain comes from. The actual game is very clear. Simply graphics, but effective, and the character animations are top notch.]