A beguiling experience, so much so that I ended up replaying it within a week of finishing it for the first time.

I think this game threw me off in my first encounter with it because the early-game seems to have such a focus on dictatorships and their oppressive powers, as the child you guide sneaks past guards and their vicious patrol dogs, as people are turned into zombies, cattle even, whilst the land is left to ruin. I assumed that on some level that was just going to just be the point, each gut-wrenching death an admonishment of the system enacting them, and so was caught completely off-guard by the game's increasingly surreal and fantastical developments.

More prepared for this mysterious world's descent into progressively stranger and unreal territory on my second playthrough, more prepared for how the visceral, very real horror that inhabits the game from its opening moments eventually warps into the kind of horror that consumes our minds, our very flesh, I ended up being even more on-board with what's going on here.

The game leaves a lot up to interpretation, but my own personal read is that INSIDE is very much about control. The most immediate tie-in here is how oppressive systems seek to exert control, but the game expands on this asking questions about the nature of control within narrative, control within videogames, and how ultimately who is in control is so often going to come down to a matter of perspective. I have a lot of feelings, largely positive, regarding how the game explores all of this but don't want to send this review into the territory of overt spoilers.

Despite all the things I love about this game, I do think it tries a bit too hard to be, well, a game in the conventional sense. The subtle environmental platform-puzzler aspects that weave themselves into your adventure as your propel yourself along are wonderfully handled, but moments when the game stops you in your tracks to make these puzzles more of a focal point are much less appealing to me all at once disrupting the immersion brought by the game's atmosphere by making the environments less believable whilst also bringing the game's compelling forward momentum to a grinding halt. This all just leaves me wishing the game had leant even harder into its narrative and artistic focus.

That all said, INSIDE is a wonderful little experience, one whose best moments and ideas tunnelled into my brain, and whose ending arc is going to stick with me for a long time.

Having grown weary with owning the world, Miyamoto withdrew so that he could spend a few years creating another one. Mario 64 codified the public identity of the "video game" just as much as Super Mario Bros did in 1985, and just as Super Mario Bros 3 emasculated all pretenders, Super Mario 64 made Crash Bandicoot look like a visionless hack and made Bubsy look like an absolute fucking moron.

This time though, the frontiers were so unknown, so vast and unexplored, that not even Miyamoto and his hardened gang of murderers could pull it off flawlessly. Super Mario 64 has an infamously whiny, uncooperative camera by any modern standard, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely forgivable considering it invented the fucking thing. Even Jumping Flash just dodged the question by going first-person.

For a second time, Mario had not just tightened his grip on video games, he had remade them in his own image. 3D platformers made from the same mold would define the next two generations. Then and only then would video games begin to slip through the plumber's glovey hands.