For this reason, I’ve been vague on the details of the story in writing this article. In this way, I’ve been reflecting since playing The Witness for over a year now. In this respect, I ruined the experience for myself, at least the experience of mulling over the game after finishing playing. Then I rushed off and devoured any “ending explained” analysis I could find. There is a shift in game mechanics and characterisation that takes the experience into a grotesque experience that would make David Cronenberg smile. I don’t know the correct term for these incorrect diagnoses but I call them ‘partial readings’. Google is full of takes that Braid is about the development of the atom bomb, which it is not. Critiques of Braid, a similarly ambiguous game, were fraught with terrible takes responding to one element of the experience and ignoring everything else. Inside is absolutely the former, but that doesn’t stop terrible analysis being applied to both. There’s a fine line between ambiguous story and underwritten nonsense. Though what will stay with me is Inside‘s storytelling. When it doesn’t work, well, at least there’s plenty of checkpoints. These heart-stopping chases had me twisting in full-body wretches, hands clutching my Steam controller so tightly it could evaporate into mist. All a matter of milliseconds is the difference between leaping from a cliff edge to escape the pursuing rabid dog and said dog chowing down on tasty boy chops from a cliffside view. By design, these escapes are by the skin of your teeth. There are many perilous chase sections with many a leap of faith across gaping chasms to escape. Armed guards, ravenous dogs and unsettling, underwater creatures hunt you down and with no means to attack them directly, you must escape. Here they take the form of precisely timed challenges. That isn’t to say Inside isn’t a challenging game. The puzzles rarely presented any solutions that garnered a eureka moment. Sometimes it’s flips and pulleys, or it’s moving boxes around, or mind-controlling other characters, but they all function as buttons nonetheless. there are three buttons in this area, press the three buttons in correct order to proceed. Sadly, the majority of puzzles are simple “order of operation” puzzles i.e. Inside‘s puzzles are out in the open and rarely need you to fail to understand how to succeed. For all that pain, they were solid “stumpers”, requiring mental and physical gymnastics to overcome and proceed. Cheap and common are these sorts of traps in Limbo. Then you reload before the trap and know you need to figure out how to safely platform past. Well, you only know it’s a puzzle after the snap and the sight of your shins shooting off in front of you. The flaw being the lethal design of the puzzles. Perversely, I prefer Limbo‘s puzzles despite them being more flawed. Both games are puzzle platformers but for as deep as their moody environments suggest, their puzzles are shallow.
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