REVIEW – PlayDead’s Limbo is one of the best videogames I’ve ever played (I completed nearly 600 games to this day). It was the game that showed to me (and to a lot of others as well) how good an independent and smaller game can be. Limbo had a fantastic atmosphere with an intelligent, layered, visual story-telling with a bit of symbolism, and had an excellent puzzle and platforming sections… and a touching, cathartic ending.

 

Six years after the release of the mentioned cult classic, PlayDead‘s new game finally arrived. Inside builds upon the foundation that made Limbo high, so there’s a lot of similarities between the two games, but at the same time, they are entirely different from each other.

Not the usual story

While Limbo was a much more personal experience, Inside‘s story is more about the possible future’s society, the importance of our consciousness, and it’s a critic about today’s brainwashed people too in a fascinating way – at least in my interpretation.

If you saw The Matrix, Dark City, Abre Los Ojos, Equilibrium, or any similar movies, you must understand a little bit more what I’m talking about. This is one of the many aspects that make this game great: there’s a lot of room for different interpretations of its story.

Innovative visuals

The other significant difference between the two games is the visual style. While both games have a very distinct art design, Inside has much more details, and a little bit more colors too compared to Limbo’s black and white dominated landscape. But maybe the most significant change regarding the visuals is the 2,5D nature of Inside.

This thing alone makes the game’s world much more alive – at least for me. There’s a lot more things happening in the background, and it usually affects the gameplay too in an interesting way.

A bit too easy

Well, if I mentioned gameplay, I want to talk about that too. It’s very fun and addictive, but it’s more straightforward this time, at least I wasn’t stuck anywhere in the game. The puzzles – most of the time – were easy enough to solve. On the other hand, it was a lot longer than Limbo; it took me 4 hours to finish it.

Also, I love the fact, that all achievements are tied to collectibles (they are required for the secret ending), so they don’t pop up when you first play through the game. This way, there isn’t any annoying stuff in the game, that can break the immersion for the player.

Ambiance par excellence

The atmosphere is top-notch, and not just because the excellent visual design. Very few artists can use silence in an efficient manner (few honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick: various movies, Christopher Nolan: Interstellar), but PlayDead can – they already proved it with Limbo, and they proved it again with Inside.

There are very few sounds or music from the game. But when they are playing, they are very, very effective.

For an acquired taste

If it wasn’t obvious enough, it’s a masterpiece. If you admit that gaming is an art form, and if you aren’t a guy with an IQ of 70 or less, who socialized on commercial trash, like the repetitive open-world games, bore fest grind-shooters, dumb Hollywood movies, or “music” loved by the mass – so in other words, if you are an intelligent human being, you are going to love this.

I think to really appreciate Inside, after you completed it, days need to the past, and you need to think about it, what was this incredible journey is all about. Don’t worry; this game makes you think anyway. Day by day, slowly you can realize the meaning of the story, and at the same time you can slowly understand the important messages and symbolism too.

-DaemonX-

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Publisher: PLAYDEAD

Developer: PLAYDEAD

Genre: Action-adventure puzzle

Release date: Jun 29, 2016