Mls Inside Video Review
Marybelle Bailey
I can't deny that I've heard some of the fuss being made about INSIDE's [official site] console release last week. I haven't read any reviews, knowing I was going to be reviewing this myself once PC code came in, but I couldn't help picking up that people were excited. So I was excited. I rather loved Limbo. I've been anticipating this. You can hear the but coming, can't you? Yeah, but, I don't love INSIDE. In fact, I'm not sure what there is about it for anyone to love. It feels like an empty, procedural, albeit often beautiful platform game with not a single original idea in its belt. Here's wot I think:
The game begins with your playing as an unidentified small boy, in an unexplained location, with undefined controls. I like all of that. There's not a single moment of interface on the screen, you learn by doing, and indeed by dying. (Although I did check the game's options to be sure that there were only two buttons used here, which is the case.) You move toward the right, because the boy is stood on the left, and you quickly learn that everyone, and everything, in the game wants him to be dead. What's going on, where you are, why you're there, is all up in the air - all you know is that danger is behind you, potential safety is in front, so you keep on moving, ducking behind objects, timing your jumps, moving objects to create opportunity, and jogging slowly to the right across barren scenes.
We can't avoid discussing Limbo at this point. Not least because the above paragraph describes it equally as well as it does this newer game. Playdead's phenomenally successful silhouetted platformer was a sublime experience - I adored it, and could barely find criticism (beyond technical issues with the port). And specifically, I was strongly in favour of the game's intent on killing the player. I thought that Limbo did this as a statement, as a means of communicating something to you, to defiantly be a game that was purposefully messing with you. Kieron rather strongly disagreed, and we argued about it on the site. Kieron's position being that it was bad game design, Rick Dangerous-esque, to force the player to fail in order to proceed. I contended that this was an exception to that rule, something special, something deliberately taking a mistake other games make and using it as a strength. We still disagree. But I've a strong feeling we'd agree on INSIDE, where the same justifications for player death really cannot be made.
Just as with Limbo, you will die an awful lot during your inexorable journey from left to right, and most of the time because you couldn't have predicted what was going to happen next. Sometimes, you could have. Sometimes - and this is where the game is at its best - it puts visual clues to a potential surprise in front of you, letting you pre-empt it and 'outwit' it. And gosh, those moments are great. Until something breaks beneath your feet, or you drown, or a dog tears you apart, or a man throttles you, or a ghostly underwater girl rips your throat open. For no reason, for no statement, simply because I guess they thought it worked in Limbo so did it again.
That's the other really odd part of INSIDE: you get to watch a small boy be brutally murdered an awful lot. In Limbo there was something horrifying about this tiny wisp of shadow being eviscerated on spinning blades, but it was abstract, detached. INSIDE is simply watching a cartoon kid get brutalised over and over. And you're made to watch - no skipping a death scene to start over here - sit still and watch the man's hands around his throat as his body goes limp. Cheers.
At about four hours long, varying depending upon how stuck you get during its more oblique moments, it is a deliberate vignette. And yet despite this, there are long stretches of dreary repetition. There's a section in a miniature submarine pod in particular that goes on and on and on, having you repeat the same actions so many times, with little variation. And pretty much everywhere, if it has a neat idea for a puzzle, it'll likely do it two or three times with diminishing returns. It also commits the absolutely cardinal sin of having you escape a particular enemy a number of times, and then scripts a sequence in which you fail to. Bleaurgh.
Let's think about some strengths. The character animation is utterly wonderful. And it's never better than when tugging open a door, or ripping boards from a window. There's such a good feeling of struggle, of the effort. The boy moves beautifully, his jumping and landing madly unrealistic but always rewarding. It controls extremely well, everything feels natural, and that's very hard to get right. Kudos there. And it's an extremely pretty game. Or, at least, it begins as one.
This is what's perhaps most strange about INSIDE - the game begins in near-monochrome gloom, and stays that way for a little while. The first real glimpse of colour is the presence of a flock of chicks, incongruously bright and cheerful in this grey and white world. But as you progress, more colour begins to seep in, and wow, it looks wonderful. Just hints, faded hues, mixed with the light, and the effect is often spectacular. Which makes it odd that it's an effect it almost entirely abandons by about halfway through. The bulk of the game is spent in squint-inducing dark, with occasional greys, and even the clever use of light and framing dropped in favour of miles of identical grey buildings with grey stairways and grey containers. Well, just take a look at my screenshot folder to get an idea:
Oh, and bloody hell, the ending. I won't say anything, obviously, but good grief it's utterly dreadful. Catastrophically stupid stuff. Impressive physics, but the atmosphere of one of those dreadful movies that would be introduced by Dr Terror on BBC2 in the 90s. Not quite where I saw it heading.
Clearly others are adoring this, so read around. I certainly will be now to try to work out what on Earth was going on last week. But I completely didn't get this. It has a few decent puzzles, all of them boringly repeated. It looks lovely, when it remembers to, but mostly doesn't. It moves and controls wonderfully, but that's not so great a feature when what you're moving and controlling is so bland. I found no pathos, no meaningful peril, no attachment to the ever-dying yet always-living character, and ultimately, no purpose.
I spent the first few hours of Inside thinking: sure, this is all fine, but it's hardly the spider, is it? That's the danger of making a follow-up to a game that has such a singular impact, I guess. In my memory, at least, when you're playing Limbo, when you're navigating that monochromatic dream world riddled with 2D platforming puzzles, you're either dealing with the spider or you're worrying about her coming back again. Inside's another near-monochromatic affair (although the understated use of dreary dawn colour is really excellent). It's set on a 2D plane once more and it's filled with all manner of platforming puzzles. Inside even has the same deft wit when it comes to delivering endless, crushing death after death after death, always with an appealing kind of bluntness. This is death as a full-stop: silent, definitive, dramatically non-dramatic. Death that says: that didn't work, so what now?
Then, somewhere around the two hour mark, I realised I'd stopped thinking about the spider. Inside doesn't replace it - although the last 20 minutes of this are easily the most memorable 20 minutes of any video game I've played in an age. It's more that the craft and care on display start to lift Inside above the impact of any one set-piece. Well, until the final set-piece, that is, but let's say no more about that. No spoilers. And for once it's not even a spoiler to know that there's something waiting for you that might very well be spoiled by reading too much. Trust me: it's not like you're going to guess it this time.
Inside, then, is better than Limbo. Its puzzles are better, its staging and its pacing is better. It has ditched a little of Limbo's lingering triteness, its smugness as its own singular nature. It's also, it must be said, pretty similar to Limbo in a lot of ways. You're a child once more, advancing left to right through a terrifying environment and overcoming hurdles that are often literally hurdles. The puzzles and the plot are one and the same here. Both can be summed up by that basic idea of getting from the left to the right.
So what's different? There's much more of an emphasis on stealth for one thing, which means there's much more of an emphasis on the world around you. While you move along a 2D plane in Inside, the rest of the landscape is always worth paying attention to, whether it's early on, when there are sinister vans (not hard to make a van sinister, is it?) tracking you through a dark forest, to further down the road where woodland has given way to cornfields and then abandoned factories, and where machines, all of which exist in that wonderful Half-Life liminal zone where it's tricky to tell what's man-made and what's something else entirely, track you with searchlights and strange, one-hit weapons.
Stealth in Inside is a surprisingly broad concept, in fact. To Playdead, it means everything from keeping out of sight to behaving in certain ways when you're entirely visible. It's often heavily rhythmic, and at times the puzzle of it is finding out which environmental and audio cues to sync yourself with.
And the other puzzles are just as smart. As it happens, the absolute smartest thing Playdead does here is to find a way to make the player feel smart too. This isn't a hard game, and yet its best puzzles still hinge on that kind of alien logic that makes you laugh out loud when you realise what's actually expected of you. The trick, I think, is to make it clear which elements belong inside a puzzle and which are extraneous. You're more willing to put in the experimentation required for many of Inside's best solutions because you can feel confident that the crucial pieces will all be close to hand. No worries about backtracking - even in a rather complex, multi-part brainteaser that sits right at the centre of the middle act. You just play with the things you have close to you until their deeper possibilities start to suggest themselves.
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