Story?

In a morbid, dark scenario full of instigating sounds, Inside delivers a simple gameplay that doesn't present much of a story and leaves you intrigued.

The first thing I felt when I started this game was a lot of tension, a feeling that Inside manages to convey very well because of the setting and soundtrack. The entire scenario is very sad and the ambient sounds make us feel very uncomfortable and pressured as the stages advance.

For example, the first song that was introduced in the game was at the moment when I needed to escape from a man who, for some unknown reason, was watching a point in the forest and, when he saw me passing by, immediately started chasing me (making me even tenser and in a hurry to get out of that place quickly).

The beginning of Inside is very confusing, as soon as you start the gameplay, you realize that you will not be introduced to anything other than the game controls. We only know that we are in control of a character who is in a forest and instinctively needs to run from some security guards. This issue got in my way a little bit to understand the game since I don't know the reasons why that boy needs to run so much and how I will get to the end without having control over it.



A game that controls you

Inside, a game that makes you feel like you are living inside a nightmare is a very sad game and, as said before, does not clearly deliver its story. I kept playing all the time and wondering what my purpose was there, and I ended up just following my trajectory, without trying to think about it much.

The game is a heap of puzzles, which have no pause between one and another, only a slight transition. When you complete one, you are already on to another without even realizing it. It is like linear gameplay (literally speaking, since the only control we have with the character is to walk back and forth, not being able to go sideways).

As the controls are limited, solving these puzzles becomes very easy. We also have the option of grabbing and pushing objects, and in every scenario there was an object present, no matter how strange it was, being useful for us to complete that phase.

In several moments of the game, I experienced very frightening situations. Inside puts you through some very tense moments, and as much as it may seem that the background is there just for "decoration", it can also interact with you (before you know it you will have a very strong chase anxiety). That said, beware of the animals you meet along the way, that's all I can say.



And that is precisely the experience that Inside delivers, an "if it's too quiet, it's wrong" kind of thinking. This game doesn't leave you calm or at ease to do everything without haste and with speed, except for a few very rare moments.

Besides the melancholic theme, the game has a very different art style, in which the faces of the characters have no features and no emotions. Everything looks pretty monotonous, it is a big race for (or to) something that we don't know what it is yet.

At every moment, I felt very nervous and pressured. Despite the development of the mystery of the game, the melancholy and the way the story was shown ended up disconnecting me several times from the gameplay, but I have to recognize that Inside met the expectations and delivered what it promised within its genre.



As it is a short game, estimated at 4 hours, it is a gameplay that makes you think and create numerous theories for that untold story. It is on purpose that there is no narrative and no dialogue, just to generate doubts and make you think.

With this, the game has no instructions but is very intuitive. It is not difficult, the phases are very simple, what really complicates are all the tense moments that only get worse with the soundtrack, with songs that make you even more nervous and anxious.

Soon after my first death, I found out more easily how I would pass the next phases. I died in the very first puzzle, where two security guards spotted me with a flashlight and ran after me, and I quickly got the hang of it.

In my opinion, the gameplay of Inside is a bit slow if you take into consideration the fact that there are no dialogs. We have to constantly look for objects in the scenery, climb, jump, and move forward, but that's it. The reflection, for me, was left for after the game, a kind of "what just happened here?" feeling, precisely because I had only created hypotheses in my head. So, it is a great game for those who like this style.



Inside is a simple game, but very creative. Few games have this power to leave the reflection with the player, not to deliver everything "chewed up" and show a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. It may sound silly, but puzzle games in general don't have that much depth, and Inside manages to deliver all that.

The purpose of the theme

What struck me most about Inside is that it doesn't really present a concrete story. You have to try to figure out all those disturbing puzzles in your way and turn them into a narrative. With this, it is clear that it is a game of free interpretation, not having a defined story, but several theories created by those who play it.

In my vision, when controlling a boy who shows no emotions and seems to do everything automatically, I imagined I was in a factory, working non-stop. It is like a criticism of the capitalist system, with all the effort of a worker who needs to solve many things at the same time and who arrives at the end of the day extremely tired (having here a relation with the number of puzzles and their difficulties at each passing phase).

With this, I could understand why Inside has such a curious and different setting. At first, I was quite scared because I couldn't imagine what was coming, but as I went on with the gameplay, the fact that the screen is always dark, apathetic, and full of melancholy proved to be a very strong point, showing that the real intention of the game is to cause a certain discomfort.

If there was no such discomfort, I would not have been tense or thoughtful about it. Inside is purposely a dark game, having a color palette that varies between black, gray, red, and yellow, a topic that marries perfectly with the narrative of the game.

The image graphics are very good, Inside really has a unique art style. Despite using few colors, it accomplishes its goal simply and completely, bringing that necessary sadness to the context of the work.



About the soundtrack, it was a point very well worked. The ambient music and sounds contributed to the tension that the game brought me. For sure, if I had played with the sound on mute, I wouldn't have been so restless and anxious with this gameplay. It is simply wonderful.

The video graphics are also magnificent and, taking into account that the game asks for a simple configuration as the minimum requirement, I didn't have any problems with bugs or glitches, the game ran perfectly.