![]() Their music is designed to reinforce the mood of every scene and every moment, timed perfectly to what is happening onscreen. The musical score is composed by Martin Stig Andersen, who also did the score for Limbo, but this time he worked in collaboration with SØS Gunver Ryberg. The audio has received just as much attention as the visuals, reinforcing the boy’s animations with sharp drawn breaths of surprise, grunts of exertion, and the occasional shout of alarm. This careful attention to every scene is critical because, like Limbo, Inside is completely wordless, telling its story entirely through visuals, sound, and music. The side-on perspective lends each scene an almost stage-like quality, where everything is placed exactly so. I was reminded of the cinematic style of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, but Inside is even more skillful in this regard, albeit with a more limited set of player inputs. This animation quality extends to characters and objects in the background, combining with expert lighting and camera placement to create evocative and memorable scenes without snatching control away from the player. His interactions with objects, initiated with the context-sensitive interaction key, are also a highlight, as he strains to push things, tugs at levers, tears away boards or opens hatches. He walks, runs, trudges, and panics at appropriate times, always reacting to exactly what is happening at that moment. Sometimes he stares at whatever is happening in the background as he creeps along, sometimes he cowers and hides behind an object to keep from being seen. ![]() Deftly avoiding the chronic problem of recognizable, looping animations that plagues many games, the boy protagonist of Inside reacts to his surroundings in believable and specific ways. This is particularly effective due to top-notch animation. Inside is a masterfully staged game, with every detail of the foreground and background reinforcing the mood, or providing clues as to what is happening in this strange place. ![]() What the 3D art does allow for, however, is excellent scene setting. In Limbo’s 2D environments, left and right are the only possible directions, but Inside shows much more that is not accessible, even though it should be. There are often alternate paths visible in the background, but no option to take them the boy can only move left and right. The limited agency that players have feels odd in Inside’s new fully 3D environments. Players can move left or right, jump, and perform context-sensitive interactions with the environment, and must use these simple controls to explore and survive. But the art is similar enough to be recognizable, and in both games the boy begins in dark woods, with no explanation. The boy is also more realistically proportioned this time around, without the exaggerated large head from Limbo. Inside has evolved that artistic style, translating the visuals into a 3D, flat-shaded style that is predominantly - but unlike Limbo, not entirely - monochrome. In both games, players control a small boy in a dangerous and creepy environment, presented through highly stylized art. Inside has obvious similarities to Limbo. Looking at that now, I see that I honored the stylized all-caps naming for that game, but I cannot bring myself to do so here, for Inside or Limbo. I wrote about Limbo in the early days of this blog. Inside is Danish developer Playdead’s follow-up to Limbo, which was released way back in 2010. ![]() As always, you may click on images to view larger versions. ![]()
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