Inside is a puzzle-platformer from Playdead, following a boy’s wordless descent from a woods into an ever-deepening facility. The full game was completed through its memorable finale and zoom-out ending in a single stream.
The sense of scale is the recurring wow, with everything in the world feeling enormous and the boy like an ant within it. The comparison to Little Nightmares is telling, since this world feels a whole other level larger.
The descent narrative keeps delivering, with the facility just continuing through submerged ruins, an overgrown abandoned complex and ever-deeper chambers. The atmosphere is carried by audio, with a distant heartbeat that grows bigger, higher, louder and faster with danger.
The mind-control mechanic is a highlight, with a helmet that lets the boy command the husk-like workers and collect a crew that follows along. The gathered workers help in later sections, making the mechanic feel genuinely useful.
The blob finale is a memorable payoff, with the mass of bodies smashing through the facility and nothing able to hold it in. The ambiguity of the ending is acknowledged as a feature, with more questions at the close than at the start.
The narrative stays opaque throughout, with why the boy heads for the facility and what the workers are left unexplained. Some puzzles stump, the blob controls are clumsy, and the dog sections rely on trial and error with tight jump timing.
Overall, the sense of scale, the audio design and the mind-control gimmick make this a cool and mysterious puzzle-platformer. The opaque story and the occasional puzzle stumps are the caveats.