INSIDE (NSP, XCI) ROM + v1.0.2 Update

INSIDE is a puzzle platform game developed and published by Playdead in 2016 and was released on June 29, for Xbox One, Windows, on July 7, and August 23, for PlayStation 4. The game was released for iOS in December 2017 and Nintendo Switch in June 2018. A macOS version was released in June 2020. The player controls a boy in a dystopic world, solving environmental puzzles and avoiding death. It is the successor to Playdead’s 2010 Limbo, with similar 2.5D gameplay. The game has received critical acclaim and has won over 100 awards, including Best Independent Game at both the Game Critics Awards 2016 and The Game Awards 2016, and numerous BAFTA awards for Artistic Achievement, Game Design, Narrative, and Original Property. It has also been recognized for its outstanding art direction and audio by the D.I.C.E. Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards, respectively.

GAMEPLAY

Inside is a puzzle platformer. The player character is an unnamed boy who explores a surreal and mostly monochromatic environment presented as a 2.5D platform game. The game is dark, with color used sparingly to highlight both the player and certain parts of the environment.

The game is mostly silent, except for occasional musical cues, the boy’s vocals, dogs barking, equipment, and sound effects. The player controls the boy who walks, runs, swims, climbs, and uses objects to overcome obstacles and progress in the game. The boy gains the ability to control bodies to complete certain puzzles, a mechanic that IGN’s Marty Sliva compared to a similar mechanic in The Swapper.

At various points in the game, the player may discover hidden rooms containing glowing orbs. If all the orbs are deactivated during a playthrough, the player unlocks the game’s alternate ending. The boy can die in a multitude of ways, including drowning, being shot with a gun or tranquilizer dart, being mauled by dogs, ensnared by security machines, being blown apart by shockwaves, and others.

As in the predecessor game Limbo, these deaths are presented realistically and are often graphic, but to a larger degree, earning the ESRB’s Mature rating as opposed to Limbo’s Teen rating. If the character dies, the game continues from the most recent checkpoint.

PLOT

A boy slides down a rocky incline. While running through a forest, he encounters masked guards with flashlights, as well as vehicles with mounted spotlights, and fierce guard dogs. He escapes the guards, then crosses a road where a block has been set up with more vehicles and guards, to a farm where parasitic worms cause pigs to run rampant.  The boy uses the farm animals and equipment to escape to a seemingly abandoned city where lines of zombie-like people are moved through mind control.

Beyond the city is a large factory of flooded rooms, a shock wave atrium, and a laboratory environment where scientists perform underwater experiments on bodies. While traversing these areas, the boy uses a mind-control helmet to control some of the zombies he encounters. The boy comes across an underwater siren-like creature that attaches a device to him, allowing him to breathe underwater.

Continuing through the office and laboratories, the boy sees scientists observing a large spherical chamber. The boy enters the chamber and discovers the Huddle, a monstrous mass of conjoined human bodies. After disconnecting the Huddle’s restraints the boy is pulled into it. The Huddle escapes confinement, crashing through offices, and killing some of the scientists in its path.

The scientists trap the Huddle in another tank, but the Huddle escapes again and breaks through a wooden wall. It rolls down a forested hill and comes to a stop at a grassy coastline bathed in light. If the player deactivates the hidden light orbs in the various bunkers, the boy returns to one of the bunkers and gains access to a new area. He reaches an area that includes a bank of computers and one of the mind-control helmets, powered by a nearby socket. The boy pulls the plug from the socket, and then suddenly takes the same stance as the zombies.

THEORIES

Journalists and players have offered several different theories about the game’s main ending (the freeing of the Huddle) and the alternative ending. One theory speculates that the boy is controlled by the Huddle throughout most of the game, leading him to help free the Huddle from containment. As described by Jeffrey Matulef of Eurogamer, the game impresses that the Huddle has a magnetic-like draw that leads the boy to endanger himself and unquestioningly enter the tank where the Huddle is kept to free it.

Players speculated on the theory that taking the alternate ending is working contrary to the Huddle’s goal, and the act of unplugging the computers is to release the Huddle’s control on the boy. Some believe that in the world of Inside, humanity has almost been destroyed because of some ultimate biological catastrophe and that the scientists are making experiments with the Huddle so it can control minds very far away to free itself. This has been thought because there are large quantities of buildings underwater. When the Huddle escapes, there is a 3D work of paper and wood that represents the coasts at which the Huddle arrives after escaping the tank of water.

A similar theory has the boy being controlled by one or more of the scientists, evidenced by how some of the scientists appear to aid the Huddle in escaping the facility. In this theory, the scientists put the boy through many dangers to gain strength and intelligence, so that these qualities can be absorbed by the Huddle when the boy frees it, improving the creature in a desirable manner for these scientists. A more metafictional interpretation of the game from its alternate ending is based on the notion of player agency.

Matulef summarizes this theory as “the boy is being controlled by a renegade force represented by the player”. The act of pulling the plug in the final area is similar to the concept of The Matrix, as described by PC Gamer’s Tim Clark. Matulef explains that the location of the alternate ending is only known to the player with knowledge of the main ending and not to the Huddle or the scientists. With knowledge of the game’s true ending, achieving the alternate ending is to conclude the game that “ostensibly puts an end to the boy, the blob, and any inhumane experiments being conducted”.