Games are powerful vehicles for emotion. The most common, perhaps, are frustration and gratification: the cycle of failing repeatedly at a challenge until, eventually, you triumph. But there's also awe, at grand vistas and gigantic monsters; schadenfreude, at villains unmade by their flawed plans; even love, toward characters we've gotten to know over a playthrough. If a novel or film can make you feel a thing, a game also can!
Playdead's Inside excels at delivering an emotion so unusual I don't have a single word for it. It's crucial to the best works of horror fiction, though "horror" is not itself the word, and some of Inside is indeed horrific. It's not "disgust" either, though there's plenty of gross things in Inside that might get you there. Rather, it's a profound, visceral discomfort or distress, a mix of dread and fear and grasping confusion that made me shudder and want to cry.
An extended example might help. Mild spoilers ahead; I suspect reading my analysis of the sequence might take some of the edge off it when you encounter it yourself. Depending on your tolerances, that might be a good thing, though!
The protagonist, a child with no special powers beyond youthful athleticism, explores a factory. I say "factory" because its trappings suggest industry, but there is no indication of what might have been manufactured or processed here. The looming drum-shaped objects in the background could be boilers, or storage tanks, or Cyclopean monuments. We pass many such rooms and mechanisms, all inhabiting a sort of uncanny valley of purpose: they look like they ought to be useful for something, but we will never know. The only people who could tell us would kill us on sight.
As we proceed, we notice the factory has a rhythm. Dust spills down from the rafters at regular intervals. A little deeper and we can hear a distant brief rumble on the same timer, a deep bass drumbeat. When we approach the factory's exit, these tremors have become quakes, strong enough to make objects hanging above sway and rattle. We don't know the source of these vibrations, but given how hostile this world has been all along, it can't be anything good.
When at last we exit the factory, we discover what's been making the noise: shockwaves. Blasts of force rip through the area, evident only by the debris flying through the air, the bridge ahead of us shuddering, and that low, terrible booming sound. Is this place being bombed? If so, why on such a rigid schedule? If not a bombing, then what awful test or experiment is underway, heedless of the damage it's causing?
To move ahead, we must dash from one place of shelter to the next, ducking low behind sturdy barriers and waiting out the blasts' delay. To be caught out without cover would mean instant death, the child's tiny body splattered and smeared across the walkway.
...it's not that the sequence is difficult. I think I only got the poor kid pasted three or four times, and the game's checkpointing is very generous. But the foreshadowing, the invisible nature of the threat, the tension in each dash or leap wondering if I'll make it in time, the distorted sound, the confused "but why??" of the whole absurd scenario, combined to punch me in the gut. My lip trembled, my hands clenched the controller, I silently begged for relief.
And Inside reaches that sort of brutal crescendo more than once throughout its three- to four-hour playtime. If the above sounds awesome to you, if you like it when games seize your lizard brain and squeeze, buy this and play it. You won't be disappointed.
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