It's been a bit since the first part of my Inside playthrough, though I actually finished it off shortly after. Obviously, more spoilers ahead for the ending of Inside.
When I last left off, I was avoiding what I thought was a Rusalka in the water. Any time I encountered it, it'd drown the boy and I'd have to restart from a checkpoint. Shortly after my original stopping point, I encountered it again, though this time it was an unavoidable confrontation.
There was no puzzle to solve or way to beat it, it simply drowned my character, and then revived him - with the ability to breathe underwater!
This was confusing, and I can't say I'm a fan of this approach. There was no clear signal that this was an unwinnable situation or anything different from the other encounters.
It's pretty clear this was where things started to go off the rails within the game's narrative, though things got weird in a cool way. Being able to breathe underwater was a neat mechanical movement change as it allowed for more verticality in areas with little restraint or platforming. Even cooler was the inverted gravity in areas, with water on the ceiling.
Why or how this works was never explained. I enjoy the surreal artistic value of these areas, and even a bit of the puzzle mechanics that were enabled by them, but can't help to think that this was strangely lacking context within the game beyond "this could be neat".
Further ahead were sections that were populated by regular people, not the mind controlled nulls or the ones that were hunting the boy in the beginning, but what looks like office workers. For all the efforts of trying to capture or stop the boy, these people didn't seem to care if he was there or not.
I was curious what they were all staring at in the tank, and then I found the blob - and shortly thereafter became the blob.
It's such a stark change in gameplay and jarring from a narrative standpoint. What is this thing? Why are people staring at it? It can't jump, but it can crash through things. The other NPCs seemed to have split reactions of either being terrified of it, or helping it try to escape (at one point I think they were even cheering it on).
Hungry for answers, I plowed on. The blob escaped the facility and ended up in a nice spot right by the water. That's it, that's the ending.
I can't help but feel let down by this. Inside was building up a great and tense atmosphere, only to throw it away in about the last third of the game. It would have been nice if there was more narrative components to give some explanations. Perhaps the whole point is that it'd be open to interpretation, but things got a bit too strange for me to really interpret much beyond what was built out (we still don't know why the boy was running or who he was running from, I doubt he was running to the blob).
Overall it was a fun experience, but one that left me more confused than compelled to play it again. I'd probably give it a 7/10 with the lack of a satisfying ending and explanation for the funky physics being the biggest offenders.
I'm not quite sure what I'll pick up next, people mentioned Outlast in the comments of the previous part which might be a good contender. I've started and stopped that once or twice, despite having the trilogy on disk - can't remember why exactly.
Thanks for reading, cheers!
