Hello again friend! Following up on my recent experience with Dolmen, I've decided to move on to what is a much more well received title, Inside.
I really didn't know much about this game when I started playing it and honestly it seems like going into this game relatively blind to what it is (aside from a 2D platformer) is the best way to experience it. I'm only about halfway or so through it, but so far I'm really enjoying it. There are some very clever puzzles combined with the platforming. Not so clever as to require looking up solutions, but enough to invoke a sense of "Aha!" when it clicks and it's solved. While it may not be spoilers in the traditional sense, I'm going to go ahead and make the warning now.
As an overall aesthetic and feel, I really enjoy the minimalist presentation and UI of the game - there's very little fanfare or exposition to start the game. You simply start controlling your character, a youngish boy, in a dark forest.
Very quickly it becomes apparent you're being hunted, though with no sense of by whom or why. A bit of a stealth and platforming follows, where the player must avoid being spotted by the lights, or risk getting hit with darts which results in a failure scenario.
The contrast between safety and danger (light and dark) here is superb and really builds a great environment. This mechanic of avoiding light is carried on further through the game with the majority of environments being quite dark. While the game movement is strictly 2D, the 3D world does come into play in a very natural way with how the levels are laid out. For example, this scene with security robots in the background and having to use obstacles in the midground to safely avoid them.
With the majority of the platforming focused on stealth and puzzles, there's not much in the way of traditional enemies/combat. The few enemies I've encountered so far are largely dogs (which need to be out run) or a what appears to be a rusalka (a creature from Slavic folklore who drowns those she catches in the water). The latter was a very interesting experience as it flipped the mechanics of avoiding light, to using light to keep the creature at bay.
I really enjoyed these type of encounters as it fits the overall theme well and adds tension to the experience. Too often horror or survival horror games turn into inventory management rather than invoking a sense of "how can I escape?".
From a puzzle perspective, I really enjoyed the "mind control" puzzles. The player character would get a mind control hat/device, and then the movements would be mimicked by one or more otherwise unconscious people. Not quite zombies as they don't move at all normally, these people just fall down after being controlled. In some cases, the puzzles require controlling multiple of these people, or even stacking the mind control mechanics to control a person controlling another person. It's all quite clever, but feels intuitive/easy to figure out what you're supposed to do - even if the actual solution takes a bit of working out, the mechanics are clear.
I'm really enjoying my time with this, though it feels like a pretty short title. I'll probably finish this up soon, and this may serve as the motivation to go back to Limbo at some point in the future too.