Thoughts On: Inside from Playdead

We live in a society

Inside appears to be a game I would adore. Dark atmosphere, gorgeous art direction, and a thought-provoking story all from the developers of Limbo which, if memory proves to be accurate, nails the three attributes I just listed. So is Inside a worthy successor, a genre definer, a step forward for the industry? Is it a good game?

No.

A couple things to get out of the way first. One, I know this review is three years too late, but the game is free with Xbox Live Gold right now so fight me. Two, don’t ask me to explain why I think Limbo is good and this isn’t. I couldn’t tell you without replaying Limbo and I don’t have time for that.

We could sit here and have a conversation about video games as an artistic medium, what they offer to the world, their value as a form of modern art, etc. but what I stand behind when it comes to a video game is that, above all else, what makes a video game good is it’s gameplay. It doesn’t matter how good the graphics are, how well written and performed the story is, how innovative and forward-thinking it is, how wonderful the developers are, or how big of a cult following the game has online. If your gameplay sucks, your game isn’t good. That gameplay doesn’t have to be complicated either. I’m not saying a game has to be a coding marvel like Battlefield or Grand Theft Auto V. Take the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Here is a game with simplistic gameplay, clearly designed so that anyone regardless of experience could play it, where the main gameplay mechanic is making decisions that impact the narrative with navigable environments and quick-time events thrown in, aka. interactive story telling aka. a video game. It’s a good game, one that I remember well. Needless to say at this point, Inside’s gameplay isn’t good.

From a gameplay perspective, Inside is close to the most bare-bones 2-D linear side scroller you could possibly make. There’s three controls; move, jump, and interact and with these three controls you slowly clop your way through uninspired, basic puzzles until the game ends. I would say there’s three moments where the level design actually has some creativity behind, and that’s two or three mind control helmet moments, the part where you’re in the submarine thing, and (spoiler alert!) the part when you merge with the giant blob and run around as one unit. But these moments only stick out because the rest of the game is so dull, and when comparing these moments to, like, any other 2-D side scroller, they’re still bland as hell. There’s countless examples of what this genre has to offer in the gameplay department, even in the modern world with titles such as Max: Curse of Brotherhood. But it’s not just other modern takes on the 2-D side scroller that Inside fails to live up to, it doesn’t even hold a candle to the original Super Mario Bros. which was released in 1985 which has 20x the amount of complexity in it’s gameplay systems as this game. Hell, there are flash games on notdoppler.com that are more fun than this shit. I don’t care how stellar the art direction is, how beautifully the animations are crafted, or the strength of the focused artistic vision. All of that is negated, because your shit is a boring slog to play.

And as for the story, or what there is of one, it’s not as mind boggling and “smart” as the internet would you lead to believe. I feel like the people who find this game to be really deep are the same people that consider themselves to be a lot like Rick from Rick and Morty only after having watched the show, and I like Rick and Morty so don’t @ me. Without any dialogue, Inside’s “narrative” is derived completely from visual story-telling, a concept that seems to blow people’s minds. Going off of the visuals, the general idea is clear. This game takes place in a dystopian society where people are mindless zombies enslaved to work for big, evil corporations and it’s a metaphor for our society today yata yata yata. If this kind of stuff interests you go read Anthem by Ayn Rand or something. The reason why there’s so many theories on what the story is specifically about, as in trying to rationalize all the stuff that doesn’t make any sense, is because it’s purposely vague and meant to be open for interpretation. Now I don’t have a problem with this convention in art, I’m not someone that needs an explanation for everything, but I don’t feel like there was anything shown in Inside that was meaningful or interesting enough to even warrant trying to analyze all the little details. I think people believe that when something is super vague and confusing and then “just ends” it must be riddled with hidden meaning and metaphor, and is therefore really good, and I don’t think that’s the case.

What Inside is trying to achieve transcends what we think video games are capable of and I think that’s great. Just as movies have become much more than entertainment, video games are more than capable of being a fun hobby as well as a truly unique and fascinating artistic medium. Great games made by great developers (and publishers that allow them) tap into this, but it’s not occurring enough in the industry as a whole. Inside makes an attempt to reach for something greater than itself, and I commend it for this reason, but if these ideas continue to be executed like they have here, the industry will never progress. When your gameplay sucks and your story is devoid of any original substance, you’re left with an extremely pretty chore to play. You know what 2-D side scroller has incredible graphics (better than these), thrilling gameplay, and a story with some emotional weight to it? Ori and the Blind Forest. Go play that, and then get hyped for it’s sequel, which looks even better, that’ll be released early next year. Or just go play Mario. It’s hard to beat that to be honest.