Inside

A small boy runs across a bleak and deadly landscape.

Inside was developed by Playdead, the game design team behind 2010’s Limbo, an eerie charcoal and mist masterpiece that also matches the above description. Limbo is harder than its successor—its occasional timing-based platforming sections are, quite frankly, a personal attack—but also clunkier, with stickier controls and more weakly integrated puzzles. It’s worth playing both and taking them together as a horror diptych, but Inside is the more mature work.

You control a boy in a red shirt, with the game’s camera waiting to meet him as he slides down a rock wall. He’s nameless and faceless—as muted as the rest of his world’s color palette, but for the shirt that, in the geekiest possible terms, marks him as disposable, ready to burn up on the altar of the plot—but not quite without character. It’s just all physical, all wordless. He pants. He stumbles. He turns his head to track danger bearing down on him, unavoidably slowing you down. He crouches and cowers. When you press him up against a wall, he flattens his palms against it—not to push it, but as if he’s fetched up there without warning, from a hard run, which he usually has.

I may be sitting on my sofa, moving a Steam Deck joystick, but the boy is often vulnerable and terrified, and Playdead makes me feel that distinction.

The boy runs. The earliest sequences are the most desperate and atmospheric, taking you through a woodland landscape of rivulets, cliffsides, fallen trees … and cover that often drops out right as Humvees roll in and men shine their flashlights in your direction. Every so often, I run when I should hide, or mess up the timing on my next sprint for cover, and one of these anonymous men drowns me—drowns the boy—in a shallow stream. Or chokes him unconscious. Or has him savaged by dogs.

There are many ways to die in Inside, but being blasted to bloody chunks by a sonic boom or electrocuted by a giant robot feel benign in comparison to the barking dogs and the specter of armed men swooping down on a terrified child running as fast as he can. We know this world.

It’s both a relief and a disappointment when Inside begins to move into more familiar genre territory, and the endless push to the right side of the screen leads the boy to grub-maddened pigs, mind-controlled zombies, underground labs, suspended pools, a mermaid, and more. For a while, the horror abates, and the game simply becomes a strange, mildly challenging puzzler. The warren of secret labs gets a bit monotonous, but even in its more meandering stretches, Inside rewards your engagement.

Part of that is because Playdead smartly punctuates even its lulls with the occasional spike of tension—a late-middle bit where the boy has to climb a fence to escape some dogs is particularly fine—but mostly it’s because of the game’s physicality and how it handles. It’s a pleasure to, say, climb into a diving bell and maneuver that instead, feeling the world suddenly tip on its axis, turning from a horizontal landscape to a vertical one. It’s a pleasure to watch hordes of half-naked zombies shamble around in your wake, some of them leading with their chests, others with their knees, as if their puppet strings are anchored at different points. You watch them spill out of a crashed cage or tumble willy-nilly over the edge of a platform, smacking damply against a concrete floor, and it feels like a sensory delight specific to the medium. But the biggest sensory delight—the one that swerves nauseatingly into sensory horror—is yet to come.

MAJOR SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

You steer the boy through the ruined city and the massive lab. On the way, you discover glowing helmets that let you control the zombies: you connect the boy to one, and suddenly “right” draws a zombie right while the boy stays in place (often dangling in midair, legs twitching, like he’s hanging from a light fixture).

The men with the barking dogs, the scientists in their impersonal labs—these people are supposed to control the zombies, but you and the boy have interrupted the process. And it’s fine, right? I mean, I feel a certain affection for the zombies in their ambling helplessness. I wouldn’t have made them zombies! If I utilize them to open heavy doors and then abandon them … well, that’s just what I have to do to keep going from left to right, isn’t it?

And I want to get from left to right because that’s the game. But after a certain point, Inside makes you ask, “Uh, why exactly does the boy want to get from left to right?”

Nothing but the internal logic of game play made him leave the farm with the friendly chicks. (Once you’ve de-grubbed the murderous hog, anyway.) Beyond the limits of your control, he looks and acts like all he wants safety, but you push him into greater and greater danger, and there’s not even any story to justify it.

Then the boy swims into a tank and finds an enormous blobby tube of flesh, like an amorphous mass of freshly risen dough with stray human arms and legs and skulls flopping out. There are sensors on it. You make the boy pull them free … and the creature sucks him inside, absorbing the boy into its mass.

For the last part of the game, you play as this quivering fleshy sack, walking like a pill-bug turned on its end, and this is where the game’s sense of physicality really shines. You undulate. You get injured, and blood bursts out of you, staining you. You shed limbs. You pass a crate up along the massive length of your body, shimmering and flowing around it. You crash through plate glass. You spill through small passageways, your endless flesh turning almost liquid in the process. I love all of this.

And finally, you tumble down a hillside into a patch of sunlight—the light looks strange on the creature’s slack, doughy skin, and it’s like that’s enough to let you know it’s never seen the sun—and come to rest.

It was—and this is a popular Inside fan theory, not some groundbreaking insight on my part—the creature’s story all along, not the boy’s. It’s the creature who finds closure, limp and bloodied and quite possibly breathing its last … but finally free. The boy went right for the same reason the zombies did, when he had the mind-control cap on: because something was telling him to. You, sure. But also the creature, which pulled him to it so it could finally free itself. Which killed the child as surely as the men with the dogs would have, and far more horrifically, but which is pitiable all the same. There’s a pathos to the long pre-credits shot of it lying in the grass, in the warmth. On, of course, the right of the screen.

I usually find art that tries to indict the audience annoying at best, but the way Inside wraps its story progression up in its gameplay logic—this is a world where our sympathetic boy doesn’t hesitate to control others for his own ends, even when I didn’t know what those ends were, so why was I surprised he was killed off so something else can die on its own terms? Where did I think I was going this whole time, if not to the end?—works for me. When I replay it now, I feel—and I’ve tried to emphasize this throughout—the disconnect between me and the boy. I can see that I’m making him run, just like he makes the zombies run. I find myself wondering if he wants to stop.

But I don’t let him, because I know where we’re going. There’s nothing in the game as beautiful as that hillside in the sun, and that grotesque creature finally coming to rest. I keep deciding that having that moment is worth killing him. So I steer him on.