Inmost is an intense and deeply emotional experience, and the beautiful atmosphere and how it changes throughout the runtime is excellently crafted. The story remains fairly obscure until right near the end, but I promise everything falls into place in a meaningful and satisfying way; the ending (despite mostly taking part as a long cutscene that I would have preferred to be playing) wraps up everything beautifully, and delivers a heartfelt and earnest final message that makes a lot of other 'spooky' games I've played feel a bit vapid and hollow by comparison.
The tone of the game is of course greatly helped by its striking aesthetics. The game is, at base level, rendered in pixel art with an extremely subdued colour palette, which already gives things a melancholy and eerie tone. But this art style is often subverted in small ways (a splash of colour here, a smoothly moving sprite or photorealistic particle effect there) which superbly accent and augment the world and really help bring it to life. I'm less a fan of some of the character sprites which all look a bit goofy to me (the intentionally goofy cartographer character in particular really just didn't gel with the game's aesthetic for me at all), but they are animated excellently to show emotion and the world in which they are placed is stunningly realised.
The sound design in Inmost is also absolutely fantastic. Everything in the game sounds so heavy and stark and gives a real heft and sense of unease to even mundane things and actions. There are a few moments throughout the game in particular (which I won't spoil) that use the sound design as the predominant way to deliver an emotional payoff, and these are fantastic; it proves it's perfectly possible to frighten a player without resorting to shitty jumpscares.
The gameplay is more of a mixed experience, but on the whole is decent. There are 3 characters you end up swapping between as the story progresses, and all have drastically different abilities and playstyles. The older man's sections are a decently realised puzzle-platformer world that remind me very strongly of Limbo, but taking place in a much more tightly designed world that almost feels like a miniature metroidvania at times. While these sections feel like the main feature of the game, I think I slightly preferred the little girl's sections which play more like a more traditional story-driven psychological horror game. I was less a fan of the knight's sections; his fast-paced but underdeveloped action-combat sections were too drastic a departure from the much slower gameplay of the other two characters. These sections weren't actively bad or anything like that, but I was always willing them to be over so I could return to one of the other characters.
On the whole, Inmost ends up being an excellent and rich emotional experience wrapped around what would otherwise be three pretty average core games. But rest assured, nothing here is poor quality. I've ended up enjoying this a fair bit more than I thought I would, and it has plucked heartstrings that hitherto had remained unplucked.
The tone of the game is of course greatly helped by its striking aesthetics. The game is, at base level, rendered in pixel art with an extremely subdued colour palette, which already gives things a melancholy and eerie tone. But this art style is often subverted in small ways (a splash of colour here, a smoothly moving sprite or photorealistic particle effect there) which superbly accent and augment the world and really help bring it to life. I'm less a fan of some of the character sprites which all look a bit goofy to me (the intentionally goofy cartographer character in particular really just didn't gel with the game's aesthetic for me at all), but they are animated excellently to show emotion and the world in which they are placed is stunningly realised.
The sound design in Inmost is also absolutely fantastic. Everything in the game sounds so heavy and stark and gives a real heft and sense of unease to even mundane things and actions. There are a few moments throughout the game in particular (which I won't spoil) that use the sound design as the predominant way to deliver an emotional payoff, and these are fantastic; it proves it's perfectly possible to frighten a player without resorting to shitty jumpscares.
The gameplay is more of a mixed experience, but on the whole is decent. There are 3 characters you end up swapping between as the story progresses, and all have drastically different abilities and playstyles. The older man's sections are a decently realised puzzle-platformer world that remind me very strongly of Limbo, but taking place in a much more tightly designed world that almost feels like a miniature metroidvania at times. While these sections feel like the main feature of the game, I think I slightly preferred the little girl's sections which play more like a more traditional story-driven psychological horror game. I was less a fan of the knight's sections; his fast-paced but underdeveloped action-combat sections were too drastic a departure from the much slower gameplay of the other two characters. These sections weren't actively bad or anything like that, but I was always willing them to be over so I could return to one of the other characters.
On the whole, Inmost ends up being an excellent and rich emotional experience wrapped around what would otherwise be three pretty average core games. But rest assured, nothing here is poor quality. I've ended up enjoying this a fair bit more than I thought I would, and it has plucked heartstrings that hitherto had remained unplucked.