Here is a body, running, terrified. Here is a body, starved for air in a muddy pond. Here is a body, falling and snapping in who knows how many places. Here are bodies, awaiting command in silent supplication. Here are bodies, marching, jumping, turning. Here are some slightly less shabby bodies, observing the marching bodies. Here are even more bodies, racing, vying to get a good look at one particularly large body; here they are again, running the other way now, slipping on broken glass as their creation, a body unlike any other, groans under its own weight and pitches through walls.
The limits and rhythms of these bodies define Inside, a grim game that reads like a postmodern moral folk tale that some playful parents might whisper to their children for squeals and laughter. It follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, Limbo, but does so more maturely. Inside replaces grayscale with a slightly more colorful chiaroscuro and swaps loneliness for the imbalanced, tense relationships of coexistence. The games, as expected, share a common language: both are satisfyingly Newtonian, filled with puzzles involving crates, ropes and momentum. But Inside extends this vocabulary beyond its gameplay by setting these puzzles in a world at the brink of an intellectual backswing, the equal and opposite reaction to human research pushed too far in one direction.
This moral pendulum appears in many forms, though most often in the motion of the young protagonist; whether fleeing a territorial sow or scrambling to hide from a surveillance camera, our hero changes directions again and again (which is as good a strategy as any for hiding the fact that a side-scroller is only ever about going from left to right). Even yanking planks off of a boarded up door requires a back-and-forth, push-and-pull motion. This periodicity is just one means by which the the distinction between “body” as in “body positivity” and “body” as in “a body in motion” is erased. To stand a chance of surviving the situations he finds himself in, the boy must use bodies (others’ and his own; human and otherwise) as leverage, ammunition, bait, protection, camouflage, catapult, landing pad, battering ram, sacrifice and dead weight. Bodies become media that exist to extend his will. This theme’s most transparent moments find the boy donning weird helmets and piloting the bodies of other, less (sorry) fleshed out characters, and in doing so delegating (read: remediating) the commands of the player from himself to even hollower husks, who themselves then, when possible, put on their own helmets and pass the buck of control onto their less fortunate peers, each member of this chain doing their best to affect humanity in spite of a total lack of willpower.
By turning living things into media, Inside gives us a taste of pure objectification, a coldly literal reduction from life to body to object. It’s a gradual (and clever) process, though, that brings us (sorry!) inside this perspective, makes us complicit in the objectification. We’re delighted by the birds that chirp at our feet, until they make useful projectiles. We’re disgusted by the hundreds of pig carcasses we encounter, until we have to rip the tail off of one to escape its pen. We’re appalled by the fate that might await the boy in red if he can’t outrun his pursuers, until we need to control those who didn’t run fast enough. And in the end, we’re in awe of the abomination that would subsume our hero, until we finally give in to its gravity and feel how liberating it can be to control a pure force of destruction.
Necessity makes these actions seem more convenient than horrible. Because while each bird-flinging or mind-controlling moment may be a bit squirm-inducing, Inside’s puzzles consistently involve finding the affordances of whatever tools are at the boy’s disposal. It just so happens that those tools keep turning out to be bodies and that often the most effective way to use a body is to be in control of it. So it isn’t much of a surprise, then, that when the time comes to break down walls and squeeze through tight gaps, the best available tool for the job is an amorphous, fleshy wrecking ball, nor is it inconsistent that this monstrosity is most easily piloted from the inside out. Viewing bodies as objects allows them to become tools; in Inside we see both the horrific consequences of this logic and an example of its gradual adoption.
Inside ends, fittingly, with a simple descent. An object rolls down a hill, converting its potential energy into kinetic energy and staying in motion until the outside force of friction slows it to a stop at the edge of a serene lake. Here is the most beauty this game can imagine. It is a scene devoid of pursuit, of puzzles, of conflict. It is a physical system behaving as it should. A body falls, wresting control from the player at last and becoming what it wanted to be all along: a body at rest.