InnerSpace

Pretty, but pretty frustrating

$19.99 From PolyKnight Games, polyknightgames.com Needs Steam (OS X 10.7 or later, 1GB disk space)

Exploration. Water. Subtle audio. Hypnotic visuals. Ring any bells? If you’re thinking Abzû, you’re in very similar territory. InnerSpace comes from a very similar place but, where Abzû is underwater, InnerSpace has you flying one of several “airframes” in the sky and getting your wings wet only later on. It’s rather like a more abstract No Man’s Sky, or a simpler, stylized flight sim.

InnerSpace is a calm and often very beautiful game, but it doesn’t get off to a great start: It’s heavy with cutscenes to begin with, delivering multiple false starts via loading screens that lead to yet another bit you can’t play. However, eventually it turns out there really is a game in there. Not only that, but it wants to talk to you, quite a lot.

As the game progresses, you’ll discover crucial tactics such as slicing ropes, firing your craft from perches, and smashing through scenery, as well as different kinds of airframes that you can fly, each with very different handling characteristics. The story isn’t up to much — in the early levels it keeps stopping the game to tell you some guff about lost civilizations whose relics you have to locate — but it’s a nice enough world to spend time in. It’s also a world you can get lost in: In some levels there’s little difference between the green of the sea and the green of the sky, which can be disorienting.

InnerSpace is built around puzzles, and that’s both its strength and its weakness. It’s not so much that the puzzles are hard, more that it’s often hard to discover what the puzzle actually is. This isn’t a problem unique to InnerSpace, but it’s a frustrating one when you’re dealing with demigods, the game’s Colossus-sized bosses. It’s not that they’re overpowered, as end-of-level bosses can be; it’s that you often have no clue what you’re supposed to be doing.

Exploration is a difficult one to get right. If a game hand-holds too much, it robs the player of agency; but if it leaves players to figure out what’s going on, it risks them becoming frustrated and bored, abandoning the app and launching Superhot instead. Although that might just be us.

Perhaps the issue is that InnerSpace doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It began as a college project, and feels a lot like an experience with game mechanics added on later. As an experience, InnerSpace is excellent: The game’s bubble worlds are gorgeous places to swoop and swirl, often hypnotic and relaxing. It’s a shame we found the game aspect so frustrating.

The bottom line. InnerSpace is a beautiful experience but is let down by the open gameplay, which is just a little too open. Carrie Marshall