Release Date: 29/06/2016
Played On: PS4 / Win
Available On: iOS / Mac / NS / PS4 / Win / XBO
Time Played: 3h 19m (first playthrough)
Progress: Completed Multiple Times
Developer: Playdead
Publisher: Playdead
Walking the line between esoteric art and nonsensical elitism can often be the downfall of a good idea, as the latter prevents large parts of the audience from connecting with your message. In narrative-heavy games, there is always a need for the player to understand what's happening along the way, but being too obvious is boring, while complete abstraction tends to be confusing and pointless. Suffice to say that there's an art to telling a story that pulls in the player, but doesn’t beat them over the head with a bland message.
I think this is true for any form of art and for me, I always experience this balance of understanding when I listen to music. Just about every song has been written with some kind of purposeful narrative in mind, but I would argue that whatever a songwriter wrote about their personal experience, won't resonate with me as well as my own interpretations that relate to my own experiences. This has borne true in the past, as there have been songs that I adored and connected with, only to have them rendered meaningless when I found out what the intended message actually was.
The same can be said about interacting with works of fine art, which may even depict a specific scene from a story, but can be taken as an emotional vibe instead. There are many pieces of art that I love because of how they make me feel, even though the intention may have originally been otherwise. This ambiguity in art is precisely why I love interacting with and creating all kinds of art, but I wonder if this is the case for everyone.
Perhaps I seek more of a personal emotional response when I engage with art, as I have friends who are frustrated if they are unable to connect with the intended purpose of a piece of art. Maybe I'm a little ignorant when it comes to interpreting messages and always miss the point, only to supplement it with an approximation of my own. I often wonder about this, as I feel like it might go a distance to explaining why we all connect with creative narratives in different ways. After all, we're already looking at each piece with differing perspectives, so it stands to reason that we're looking for different outcomes at the same time.
There may be no rational explanation for why individuals prefer and connect with different works of art, despite what critics and people with money would tell us. I've never been a fan of aggregate ratings, because they tell us nothing useful about the thing they are rating. Am I supposed to dislike every book that doesn't receive five stars from critics and fans? Should I be ashamed for hanging an otherwise worthless painting on my wall, simply because I like it and it brings me joy? I mean, the answer is obvious: not at all.
All of this is why my favourite narratives to encounter, are those that remain ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation, but structured enough to raise a few questions. Marilyn Manson is quoted saying that art should be a question mark and I don't think I've agreed so wholeheartedly with Mr Manson on any other point. Indeed, the art I connect with the most is the art that leaves me thinking about the possible answers to a shifting theory that sparks and requires further analysis and interpretation. This is why my favourite narratives are always the ones that pose these questions and seemingly ask me point blank how I am going to find my own meaningful bond with its message.
You might think I'm leading into a diatribe about whether or not video games should be considered art, but I don't think that's necessary because the answer is: of course they should. Some people see art as something that takes innate skill and talent to create, as if only those blessed by the gods of creation have access to the precious artistic world. I disagree with that notion entirely, because art is all-inclusive and open to everyone without exception and anything that involves an element of self-expression can be considered a work of art.
Anyway, let's bring it back to video games before this ends up being even more of a rambling mess about what is ultimately a simple concept. I think the point of this whole rant has been to justify why I tend to favour narratives over gameplay, and how some of my favourite games are kind of ambiguous and open to interpretation. It's why I loved Virginia's surreal flow, and why I got so much out of A Firm Handshake, which is one of the most basic little games I've ever played. These are the games that poke and prod at our expectations about how stories should be told in video games, all while utilising the medium itself to subvert the interaction between art and its audience.
Which brings us right around to the exact reason why I love and adore the game Inside, which has already sparked eight paragraphs of nonsense thanks to how evocative the game's narrative ends up being. I've played through this game a number of times and every experience has built on the previous one with more texture and detail. These days it should be no surprise that I think this game is brilliant, because for once the vast majority of critics and players seem to agree with me.
If you've been living under a rock and have managed to avoid knowing anything about Inside, then stay tuned for the skinny. This is the spiritual successor to the game Limbo, which was also critically acclaimed and well-liked by players, as it was one of those indie games that proved just how amazing a small creative experience could be. On paper, Inside follows a similar format to Limbo, as they are both side-scrolling puzzle platformers that feature children in a dangerous and oppressive world. However, neither game stopped at fulfilling its mechanical requirements and instead succeeded by creating immersive and unique worlds where their strange and surreal stories can be told.
Fair warning at this point; I'm not going to try and keep this spoiler free, as Inside has been out for a long time and I'm going to be talking about the game's endings. If you still haven't played the game for yourself then I suggest leaving now, even if you never come back. This is the kind of game that you want to play blind and without any expectations or spoiled concepts to ruin it for you.
Before diving into all that though, let's have a quick nod to the mechanics that drive most of the gameplay for Inside. The general progression consists of running and jumping through an ever-changing landscape that starts in the wilderness and ends up in a seemingly dystopian city. I say dystopian because the world design leads me to believe that this place exists outside of our own reality, while appearing as a stark and dishevelled version of what may come.
Most of the game and its puzzles are concentrated on the concept of mind control and experimentation. There are a bunch of scenarios where we must employ some form of mind control over others in order to progress, whether it's ordering a group of pawns to lift us up to higher levels, or sending them to stand on pressure plates and flip switches. The complexity changes through the amount of pawns we're able to control, as well as the levels of mind control available to us. Things certainly get a little trippy when you end up controlling a pawn who controls another pawn in turn, and so on.
The rest of the game largely consists of navigating hostile environments that have been created as experiments, or the result of previous disasters. A good portion of the game takes place under water, where it seems that parts of the city have been flooded and lost thanks to a disaster in the past. It's here that we meet another child who appears to live in the water, as if she was once an experiment in herself, left to survive in the depths of the abandoned ruins. Sadly, she also wants to catch us and kill us, making for some tense sequences where we're tasked with swimming through flooded underground facilities and solving navigational puzzles before we're caught and consumed.
Lastly, there are traversal sections that do a lot of world building, as well as providing formidable puzzles to overcome. In one of my favourite parts of the game, we need to navigate our way across what looks like a factory catwalk, high above a huge open expanse. It seems easy enough, except that every few seconds there is a deafening pulse of what appears to be sound waves that sweep the area. Only by hiding behind something solid can we avoid being pulverised into bits by each intimidating wave.
There's a lot more variety to be found along the way in Inside, but the engaging puzzles and mechanics themselves aren't quite as interesting to me as the underlying narrative. Even though they go a long way to contribute to the superb world building and provide a lot of context for everything else in the game. Most of the story is told through the actions we need to take in order to survive the world we find ourselves in, which begs us to question why we're doing anything in the first place.
By the time we reach Inside's final chapters, it's fair to be asking ourselves what the point of it all is, and why we've endured everything it took to reach that point. The whole game drives our lad doggedly to the right and consistently motivates us to keep on moving and figuring out how to progress. Our first assumption might be thanks to all those dystopian movies and books we're familiar with and we might assume that this boy is going to topple the controlling powers and free all of the common folk who seem to be slaves to this strange and horrific system. I have to admit that I was expecting to eventually run into some kind of boss at the end of the game that would wrap everything up, but happily I was wrong.
During the final sequences of Inside, we find ourselves in what appears to be a scientific facility with lots of office space and scientists walking about. Eventually we make our way into a vast spherical tank where a large blob of human body parts is floating about and being generally a bit gross and dysmorphic. I learned later that this blob was referred to as the Huddle, which is a disturbingly fitting name that only raises more questions about the nature of its being. Regardless of names though, our boy finds his way into the tank with the Huddle and is drawn into its mass, seemingly becoming a part of its collective self.
We then get to play as the Huddle, which is large and powerful and happy to smash its way out of the facility and find destroy anything and anyone that gets in its way. Crowds of scientists follow the path of destruction, while others open up doors and alternate avenues of escape, encouraging the Huddle to keep going. Before too long we find ourselves outside again, tumbling through the wilderness, bloodied and bruised by the whole ordeal, slowly coming to rest at the bank of an unknown body of water.
I'm not alone in theorising that the Huddle itself is some kind of alien or evolved being that the scientists in the game are trying to study in order to replicate its mind control power. One prevailing theory about Inside's narrative is that the Huddle has been controlling the boy throughout the entire game, always bringing him closer to its location. Once they merge and become a single being, the Huddle is then powerful enough to break free of its containment and make its escape. However, there is an alternate ending to Inside that I think offers a much more blatant explanation about the nature of the game's world.
Throughout each chapter are a series of hidden areas that contain small powered spheres, much like the larger sphere that contains the Huddle at the science facility. Each of these smaller spheres can be unplugged, which essentially powers them off, but doesn't seem to do anything else of note. At least not until they have all be deactivated and we find ourselves in a room with monitors and one of the mind control devices we used to control the pawns that helped us along the way. If we then unplug this device, our boy goes limp and we are no longer able to control him in the game, suggesting that we (the player) were controlling him in a similar way to how he controlled the pawns.
I don't think it matters if you believe that the Huddle was in control all along, or if you reach the alternate ending and decide that this is some fourth-wall breaking allegory for players controlling characters in games. Either explanation fits, but what really excites me is how it's all left open for us to insert our own opinions and thoughts into the mix. As someone who doesn't always appreciate the literal translation of events, I found my mind wandering into philosophical realms where I began to question the very nature of humanity itself.
I think it's safe to say that Inside is ultimately about control in some form or another, but it's raising some interesting questions about the nature of control itself and the acceptability of it in the modern world. There are many scenes where I thought about the onslaught of online advertising and data farming, and how all of that information is used in attempts to control what we do in our daily lives. We've already seen real-world examples of this coming into play, with social media being an obvious conduit for psychological systems of control to be tested and implemented. The internet is our modern day invisible hand, and we're all subjected to its pressure and manipulative forces.
It might be that Inside was created as a warning of what may come in the future, after the markets collapse and our contemporary society breaks down. Could it all end up with that wealthy one percent exploiting the rest of the population to its own ends, or has this shift already begun. I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I do know a thing or two about sociology and systems of power and control that exist in our society. To that end, this is a game that has a lot to say about our state of existence, and a dire warning for where we are headed.
On the other hand, perhaps the game is trying to give value and substance to the fictional characters and worlds we play with in video games. When stories are created, are they not brought to life and entered into the fabric of reality, and if so, what responsibility do we as artists and audience have for those creations? After all, video games are an interactive medium and the events on screen won't take place without input from the player who has the power to make or break the entire experience. Or maybe the whole game is just about some weird futuristic world and everything is controlled by the hideous alien Huddle that simply wants to break free and hypnotise a young boy to help it do just that.
Sure, I could ramble on for many more paragraphs on different theories about Inside's world and story, but the main point of doing so would be to illustrate how well this game turns itself into a question mark. Through surreal ambiguity and striking design, there are plenty of opportunities to soak everything in and begin thinking about all the possibilities that surround this superb narrative.
What I really love about a game like Inside is that care and detail has been applied in the right places, while open spaces have been left without guidance for the player to fill in on their own. Some narrative fall over themselves trying to explain just how complex and wonderful their world is, but I often find those worlds overwhelming and foreign in a way that I'm unable to connect with. I'd much rather have a game open up a large space and invite me to jump on in, than have it dictate everything I'm supposed to be feeling. The latter never manages to properly align with my own thoughts and emotions, leaving me alienated like I'd missed out on some key element of the piece.
There's definitely something to be said for a well told story that delivers its message clearly and unambiguously, but I'll always fall on the side of the open-ended tales that really get me thinking. These are the games that I end up replaying to remind myself of every nuance along the way. These are the games that I truly cherish and believe everyone should play at some point in their gaming lives. Inside is an exemplar of this kind of game, and I think everyone would be better off for having played it. This is one of the very rare games that I would risk calling perfect, as it excels in every single department and delivers more than I ever thought possible.