A real testament to swinging for the fences. It packs in so many ideas and tries so much impossibly cool shit that it's pretty easy to excuse just how much it botches basic design in spots. It's a massive game with a really vast galaxy to explore, and yet there's no quest log or journal of any sort. It has really smart, Valkyria Chronicles-esque squad management for staffing all your ships, but it doesn't make the barest effort to teach you about any of it. It is one of the least user friendly games you will ever find.

But I love it, I really do! It's so impossibly ambitious it's hard to believe they even attempted going for this on the DS of all things, let alone the fact that they pulled off so much crazy shit. It is one of the least polished games Platinum has ever put out, but it's left more of a mark on me than like 80% of their library. Its plot is a smart, full-on space opera that cares so deeply about the world it creates. It's vast and ambitious and spans decades and countless planets and it's just...so damn cool to think about. I love this game so much.

Given the massive amounts of praise Limbo got when it came out, I was wary of the same hype that surrounded Inside upon its release. Playdead's 2010 debut was a moody yet ultimately monotonous pantomime. What I gleaned from the scant pre-release coverage of Inside was all discreet excitement, critics pushing people to just play the game knowing as little as possible. The only "concrete" positive that was proffered was "it's better than Limbo". It wasn't exactly the most convincing argument for me, as I've played so many games that are better than Limbo that I don't consider to be all that good.

So I didn't touch Inside, and shut myself off of any talk about it. Not until a friend who got it, beat it, and joined the ranks of secretive believers had me play through the whole thing in one sitting with his copy. Inside is, in fact, better than Limbo, and it is, in fact, a good game.

Limbo is an admirable, ethereal sketch from a startup indie studio, a prototype for pondering the afterlife. Inside is a robust, well-oiled machine that executes a pulverizing dystopic vision of industrial slavery with ruthless efficiency. You can almost see the millions of dollars and the years spent on every frame of animation, every shadow cast in stark light, and every increasingly loud boom that reverberates through your hands and into your skull on every discrete window into this post-apocalyptic world.

It's sinister how it deliberately drills into your brain the mundane mechanics to solve puzzles, only to twist them ever so slightly right as their rules have embedded in your head. And then, for the last cruel laugh, when you think you've got the game all under control, Inside blows your mind with a climax that is forever seared into my soul.

I've already said too much, so let me just end by saying that you need to play Inside.