Inmost, developed by Hidden Layer Games, is a beautifully crafted while simultaneously bleak puzzle platformer that explores themes of grief, mourning, acceptance, and hope in the wake of tremendous loss. Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch (reviewed on), iOS Inmost tells a disturbing yet beautiful tale set in a complex world and offers one of the best puzzle platforming experiences of recent memory. On the visual and audio fronts, this game is an absolute winner.By Nick Forsythe 2 years ago Follow Tweet There are so many pixel-based games kicking around these days, but Inmost’s visual presentation singles it out from the pack, using parallax-styled backgrounds, rustling vegetation, and superb lighting to add impressive atmosphere to every scene. There’s a fantastic chase encounter with a masked shadow through a crypt, some alarming moments with the little girl that render a fierce emotional response, and an incredibly effective soundtrack. It’s unfortunate that the narrative misfires this tone, but that doesn’t mean that Inmost lacks for great moments. One character frequently gathers collectible “shards of pain,” which can be delivered to an NPC for enigmatic story fragments, all written with a goofy hissing “s.” Some sections of the game feature voiceover, delivered by actors clearly instructed to perform these lines as if they were the most sacred and profound conclusions ever summoned, which makes a sentence like “It simply is what it is” unintentionally hilarious. Whether or not these aspects are in any way framed by a real-life invested catharsis is unclear, but the quality of the story itself often wavers into amateurish cringe. Pain and grief, psychosis and trauma, childhood tragedy, and especially how these elements fracture families are all willfully explored and presented, but there’s also a conspicuous lack of sophistication in the narrative. In avoidance of spoilers, that context is fairly grim. This means that there’s never a sense of agency, which might be intentional, considering the subject matter. There are death states, though checkpointing is usually negligibly close - in some cases, whether or not this is a bug, players temporally respawn after they’ve died, which can be unexpectedly convenient - and the only meaningful challenge ever presented is figuring out where to travel to push things along and activate the next scene. Here, players inch through rooms, shoving chairs and boxes, solving uninteresting “puzzles” of sorts, and occasionally activating plot developments.Īlthough Inmost looks like a platformer, it’s probably most similar to a point-and-click adventure. It doesn’t help that the story progression and even the characters’ movement itself is usually glacial, especially the sections from the POV of the little girl. On first blush, there arrives the notion that something about Inmost’s development was rushed and left to rest entirely on the finale’s shoulders, and the short length of the game makes this apparent compromise felt more deeply. Unfortunately, that narrative begins to falter, eventually unraveling into a bizarrely lengthy coda. A flower, a stuffed rabbit toy, a knife, a few crude drawings, a housefire - for a portion of the game, these little sprinkles of story adeptly prod the mystery, and new scenes add context to previous ones. The unnamed macabre environment always feels ominously meaningful, and certain symbols and events echo throughout the fractured narrative. Inmost’s trinity of heroes are built of just a few pixels and colors, but their animated mannerisms and the gorgeous backgrounds flowing behind them add an incredible sense of place. Related: Sheepo Review: Adorable Creature Comforts A few other characters soon emerge, all of whom speak in riddles or obscure phrases, and eventually other controllable characters as well, including a young girl trapped in a house and a knight wielding a powerful sword with a hookshot. A small male avatar can mosey around, jump over pits, and scramble up ladders, but soon encounters deadly shadowy figures with no means to defend himself. Behind and to the left lies a derelict home, while ahead and to the right is a kind of unfurling overgrown castle, constantly reaching upwards to the night sky. A park bench under a streetlight offers two paths.
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