Inside Review

Inside contains no dialogue, no text and no map, and it is never once unclear what you are meant to do or how frightened you should be. Playdead manages that with light: the eye is pulled left to right by a lamp, a doorway, a shaft of colour in a grey field, and the puzzles are placed exactly where you were already looking. The boy runs with a weight and a stumble that make every near miss physical, and the sound design, recorded in part through a human skull, keeps pressure on during long stretches where nothing is actually chasing you.

The mind control sequences are the design at its sharpest, turning a crowd of bodies into a tool and a horror at once, and the underwater passages give the game its only real moment of grace. It runs three hours, offers nothing to do afterwards, and refuses to explain a single thing, the ending included, which is the point where it either wins you completely or loses you outright. Almost nobody who finished it stopped thinking about it that week.