Inside – Nindie Spotlight – A Beautiful and Creepy Experience
After the release of Limbo back in 2010, fans had high expectations for any new game Playdead might release. Inside took those expectations and went absolutely through the roof with a new creepy, minimalistic puzzle-platformer to keep you on the edge of your seat. With everything about it being simply fantastic, I absolutely have to recommend this game, now let’s go into a little more detail on why.
I am The Never Yak, and this is your Nindie Spotlight for today: Inside.
In Inside, you play as a nameless young boy who you must guide through a series of puzzles and escape scenes. He’s very easy to manoeuvre, with only jump, walk, and grab to work with. Despite these simple controls, Inside utilises them to the maximum making each level feel unique.
Something else I absolutely love about the game was the protagonist’s automatic animations. When you approach a bit where the enemies are present, he’ll automatically go into a crouching position or automatically switch to running in an escape scene.
Although it doesn’t impact the actual gameplay, it does add some life to the character that I really enjoyed seeing.
Going into further detail about the puzzles, I love the variety and creativity of each one. Although they all propose new ideas, they aren’t so vastly different from each other that I felt I was having to learn how to do something brand new each time.
The difficulty level is also perfect. It’s consistently challenging, increases at a steady rate, and never has any unwelcome spikes. I only remember having to use a walkthrough on two or three of the levels, and that was more due to my lack of cognitive ability than the game being too tough.
I also want to talk about the rich lore and world-building Inside offers. The theories bouncing around about the haunting story behind the game’s apocalyptic setting is fascinating. What is the link between the terrifying dogs, the seemingly mindless, zombie-like citizens, and the freaky girls that live in the water? Well that’s pretty much all up for the player to determine.
Although I don’t know of any full story theories that have been confirmed by Playdead, they do slide in just enough hints to let you have a good guess.
Regardless of what the full tale is, you can not deny that Inside is creepy. Properly creepy. I originally played it with a big group of friends, and there were moments where we all collectively jumped at a scary moment or frantically pointed at the screen desperately trying to get the person controlling it to escape the evil rabid dogs.
Finally, I just have to get out all my praise for Inside‘s art style. Although it’s minimalistic with its faceless and small characters, it still conveys a bold and striking image of a ruined world that I absolutely loved experiencing.
The way tiny cracks of light glisten in through windows onto the blue and grey scenery bellow is absolutely gorgeous. The backgrounds are so stunning, and in the small parts where I was walking between levels, I just got completely lost in them.
Inside is an atmospherically creepy game that I just couldn’t put down. The puzzles never fail to be creative and exciting, and I was always so excited to see what the game had in store for me.
The art is just perfect in every way and creates a fantastic visual image to pair with this intense adventure that always had me right on the edge of my seat.
There is your Nindie Spotlight on Inside! Join us next time for another brief look into the Nintendo Switch’s best Nindie titles. What are some of your favorite indie games? Let us know in the comments below! Thank you for visiting Nintendo Link.
