Playdead’s Inside
One boy’s bad day turns decidedly strange
Free, or $6.99 for full game From Playdead, playdead.com Made for iPhone 6S, iPad Air 2, Apple TV Needs iOS 11
Death comes easily in Inside, and the first couple of times it comes as a shock. Your character, a small boy in a red sweater, is fragile, falling to attacks from the callous adults who hunt him or to a bite from a cruel dog. It seems like a hateful game at first, the boy stumbling in his constant flight from left to right, hiding from searchlights and their accompaniment of more death. You’ll leap walls and chasms in desperation, wade waist deep through water, and lie twitching after being hit by the almost comically large darts fired at you. Then you pull a writhing eel from a pig’s backside, and the game starts to make you smile.
That’s no spoiler — there’s much worse to come if you pay for the full game — but the contrast of Inside’s brittle protagonist in a world stacked against him and the weird, unexplained, flashes of biological experiments, lethal underwater creatures, and mind control machines means the glorious cathartic rampage of an ending fills you with glee.
The game, from the makers of Limbo, hasn’t arrived on iOS unscathed. Running and jumping are mapped to slides and flicks of the finger, which works well, but having to use a long press on the screen to perform actions like exiting a vehicle is unfortunate, though it does remove the need for on-screen buttons. None of your interactions is explained, leading to frustration with early jumps and puzzles that impede your progress. It’s also extremely dark, requiring full brightness to play in anything like daylight, and its smooth fuzziness feels strange in these days of super-sharp screens.
We’ve shifted crates and swum through water before, but when such elements are presented like this — with dark humor, wriggly bum snakes, sharp design, and the ability to squeeze genuine sympathy from the most jaded player — they gain new life. Inside isn’t a long game, but it’s certainly memorable. And it will make you laugh as much as it makes you want to cry. The bottom line. Platforms and puzzles, but also moments you won’t soon forget. Ian Evenden