Video Game / INSIDE (2016)

Inside (stylized INSIDE) is a Puzzle Platformer by Playdead, the developers of Limbo. Although its name wasn't revealed until E3 2014, the game was in development since 2010, only a few months after Limbo was released. It runs on the Unity engine. The game was released on June 29, 2016 for Xbox One, July 7, 2016 for Microsoft Windows, August 23, 2016 for Play Station 4, and June 28, 2018 for Nintendo Switch.

You play as a young boy in a dangerous and hostile world, but rather than the supernatural horror of Limbo, this story is one of mechanical and technological advancement gained through human experimentation and cruelty. The boy finds himself traversing this almost ruined world, drawn to the center of a dark project. Much of the story is left open to interpretation this time as well.

Trailers and gameplay can be seen here and here.

Shouldn't be confused with the 2007 French home invasion film or Willem Dafoe's 2023 psychological thriller.

---

This game provides examples of:

• 2½D: Unlike Limbo in which the gameplay used exclusively 2D elements, this game uses depth and background based puzzles, in addition to more elaborate 3D environments.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: The game fakes you out twice by suddenly introducing what seems to be an endgame power, but it's actually only the third one that you end the game with:
  • Firstly, you hang from another mind control helmet, except this one snaps off, letting you lead around a crew of bodies to lift you higher and move heavy objects. However, you lose this suddenly when the helmet is blown off by an explosion.
  • In the underwater facilities, the boy is dragged underwater and drowned by The Ophelia. As he goes down, he is latched to a cable that "upgrades" him so he can stay underwater indefinitely, and can control humans without the helmet. You keep this for the rest of the game.
  • The game's final sequence is as (the controller of) a lumbering mass of flesh that's strong enough to barge through walls and can't be killed by anything in-game.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Given the depths you are required to dive, you could be forgiven for assuming the facility you're swimming around was built into the Mariana Trench.
• All According to Plan: It's pretty much spelled out by the final sequence of the game that the scientists were expecting the Huddle to attempt an escape. The scientists are rushing to the tank to see the moment when you merge with it, are watching calmly from catwalks along your path, provide the Huddle with cubes to assist in the "escape," and are even gathered around a diorama of the final scene of the regular ending that the Huddle just happens to crash into. One Youtuber zoomed into that diorama and sure enough, there's a model of the Huddle in there, in the game's signature yellow shade. The small fetch quest involving a run across a fire-strewn path makes it pretty obvious that the scientists are trying to test what the Huddle is capable of doing.
• All There in the Manual: Playdead calls the mass of bodies at the end the "Huddle."
• Alternate Reality Game: Players noticed that a printer in the lab by the spherical tank was printing out a sequence of dots, dashes and slashes. While it was eligible as Morse code, what was found was the beginning of a full ARG surrounding a mysterious "terminal41," alongside text and images that may hint at Playdead's next game, which is a science fiction-themed title to be set on a distant planet.
• Ambiguous Ending: After a long, terrifying and painful journey attempting to escape to safety, you ultimately end up as a fleshy husk motionless on a beach (apparently) just outside the facility. It's unclear whether you survived, whether you really escaped, or whether it was the correct way to deal with the Mind Control. Fan consensus is that this ending was what the scientists were looking for (see All According to Plan above).
• Ambiguous Situation: A whole lot worse to figure out this time too — unlike Limbo, which was almost entirely symbolic, it appears that INSIDE does hold some answers to its most confusing questions. It's widely accepted that the bonus ending basically tells the player that the boy is under the mind control, but this creates a lot more questions- if he is, why can he emote so effectively and pass for a real human perfectly? And who is controlling him? Is it you?
  • There's also a lot of ambiguity on whether or not you were ever "outside" to begin with. Certain things like spotlights that seem a tad too convenient, the insistence of a lot of your human stalkers to at least try and take you alive, the omnipresence of certain things like the Orbs required for the secret ending, and the sheer Eldritch Location level use of geometry and space would all seem to point to the entire game taking place in some sort of massive facility. One thing that further cements this is during your rampage as the Huddle, you fall into a small diorama that is an exact scale replica of the place you find yourself in after "escaping" the facility, making the whole rampage sequence seem like a huge experiment.
  • If the boy really was a remote body the entire time, like the ones the scientists were controlling, does that mean the part where you take control of the Huddle and supposedly escape the facility is actually just another part of the experimental process?
  • The boy's motive for going to the facility is unclear. Does he get forced into it on his attempt to escape? Does he nobly want to stop the facility of his own free will? Or is he mind-controlled by the Huddle (or as presented in the secret ending, something else) telling him to free it?
  • Since we never see multiple onscreen at the same time, it's unclear if there's one swimming girl bypassing closed exits to chase you again or if there's more, each in their own enclosed section.
• Angry Guard Dog: If you see or hear a dog, prepare to run like hell. They are fast, fierce, persistent, and they want you dead.
• Antepiece: The game is full of them. For example, the first time you use the meet the dogs or the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, you can escape them safely by just walking or swimming forward, but in later occasions you will have to think a bit more about it.
• Artistic License – Biology: The player character is required at times to swim surprisingly deep underwater, at depths that have tremendous water pressure. Doing so in real life would rupture the eardrums or even crack the skull open, but the only indication that anything is amiss is when he starts to drown. This is possibly justified later when he gains his Super Not-Drowning Skills.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The underwater Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl doesn't seem to have genitalia. ...and apparently neither does the main character. Since every character in the game also lacks facial features, it's possible this is just the art style at work.
• Beware of Vicious Dog: Angry dogs are among the obstacles you must run away from. If you see or hear one, run the hell away, because they are fast, persistent, can swim (but can't dive), and will kill and maul you. And since the player character is a defenseless little boy, you have no choice but to run away and avoid them.
• Bittersweet Ending: A common interpretation of the secret ending is that the boy broke free from his control and disabled the system puppeteering him, disabling himself and foiling the scientists' "activist breaches into containment and escapes with our Huddle" test.
• Blending-In Stealth Gameplay: In one level, the player must join a line of mind-controlled zombies whose responses to commands are being tested —in certain marked squares on the ground, the controlled are made to perform extra actions, and the player must walk, turn, and jump at the correct times to avoid alerting the camera scanning them.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to Playdead's previous work, Limbo, Inside is even more gruesome. The boy can be shot, have his throat ripped out by dogs, drown, be blown apart by sonic waves and be choked to death. And once the boy joins the Huddle, anyone who gets in your way is trampled. And should you crush the lone man in the office, his body will be reduced to a red splatter on both the floor and your body as his scream rings out.
• Body Horror: The remote bodies you see later in the game are not in good shape: some are missing a few or all their limbs, and a few more can be seen without heads. A few seem bloated from water, and there's the possibility that they are failed attempts at synthetic people. That's not even getting into the total abomination, the Huddle, that you see later.
• Body of Bodies: You merge with one at the end and essentially transform into a rampaging kaiju.
• The Cameo: With some searching, a very familiar boy can be found in the grass.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The puzzle in the city where you control a body that controls a body. It gets used again later, making you think that that was the ultimate payoff. And then you find the secret ending where you come to realize that YOU had been controlled like that the entire time.
• Chekhov's Gun: If some interactive object is simple enough to feel like pointless busywork (for example, flipping an obvious switch before you can proceed), it's either because you haven't figured out why it's really there yet, or it's teaching you something you need to remember later.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The mind control helmets all emit a stale shade of yellow. The parasitic worms that are found burrowed into the pigs (and control one into attacking you) are the same colour. The mysterious Orbs hidden throughout the game emit a light of the same colour, and the cabling that hints at an Orb's nearby location is also that same yellow. Those people pods at the beginning of the game? A window in the door gives off a glow of that same yellow, too.
• Crate Expectations: Just like Limbo, if you see a crate, don't even bother skipping over it, because it's part of a puzzle.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Should you crush what seems to be the CEO, he suffers the fate of being pushed out a window by a massive Body of Bodies, falling a great height, screaming unnervingly loudly all the way down, and being reduced to a red splatter on the ground.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Averted. Unlike its predecessor, the game utilizes a color palette beyond black and white, which is easiest to see when objects and characters are standing in light (or simply are light sources). However, the colors are very desaturated to help maintain the game's oppressive atmosphere.
• Determinator: As long as the boy lives, he just won't give up.
• Direct Continuous Levels: The game features a total of around 50 'levels', but there is no loading barrier between them - you can play the whole game in one go with no transitions.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl's attacks are... very physical, and she is apparently naked, and she does give the boy a mouth-to-mouth when giving him the ability to breathe underwater.
• Down the Drain: Unlike the boy in Limbo, your character can swim, and many of the puzzle sections involve going surprisingly deep underwater, including in a submarine, through a maze of flooded rooms.
• Dystopia: The whole game takes place inside an utterly massive complex built upon the ruins of a much older, dilapidated city. People are enslaved en masse, and used as either fodder for experiments on weird, otherworldly Mind Control technology or slave labor using helmets that command them telepathically. Parts of the city have no clear purpose and are unnecessarily huge, and seem to go on forever. People in white masks appear to be in control of herding the captured slaves, and these masked individuals notably include children. At the end of the game, you enter what appears to be the newest part of the city, and get in on the conspiracy mentioned above. You hijack a massive fusion of several people together into something that looks straight out of Silent Hill before going on a rampage. Whatever the ball of flesh was made for is never completely explained, but considering the plugs you pull off of it look identical to mind control helmets, it's possible it was controlling all the "active" slaves you saw towards the beginning of the game.
• Easter Egg: There are enough in the game that one of the speedrun categories is All Easter Eggs. One of them comes up in the standard progression of the game: Wait long enough in the CEO's office and he will move out of your way so that you may spare him instead of kill him.
• Elaborate Underground Base: Virtually the entire game is about traveling deeper and deeper inside one. It's mind-bogglingly huge; most of it serves no clear purpose (like the "wave room" mentioned below, which appears to be several miles long), and a lot of it has been abandoned and/or flooded.
• Eldritch Location: The lab, or office building, or whatever it is that you are running/jumping/swimming through makes no logical sense. You can descend what appears to be hundreds of feet underwater, only travel straight along and emerge on dry land. The facility is utterly massive and also completely nonsensical in its application as well. What appear to be working train stations sit above a completely destroyed factory, for instance, and there's no clear purpose as to what the shockwave room is even for. And then, after descending what feels like thousands of feet underground, when the Blob you become a part of breaks through the final wall, where do you end up? Outside. Tumbling down a mountain no less. There is some evidence that your final location may still be, well, inside the base- there's a diorama glimpsed during your final rampage that matches your final position.
• Escaped from the Lab: Your character appears to be doing the inverse of this. Played straight (though with ambiguous success) once you join with the Huddle.
• Eternal Engine: One level appears to take place in a factory. At one point your character confronts some form of generator rhythmically emitting shock waves powerful enough to explode you into gibs and blow you off the screen.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Assuming the people we see are evil, quite a few of them are seen with, presumably, their children.
• Everything-Is-Smashable Area: Near the end of the game, the kid becomes a part of the Blob and can just smashes through the entire laboratory with no regards to windows, walls, or human lives.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: To the point where you're nervous around a flock of chicks. Luckily they're harmless. You still have to blow the poor buggers through a grain vacuum to solve a puzzle, however. All but one of them survive this, thankfully.
• The Faceless: Every human character in the game is portrayed without a face. This contributes to both the minimalist art style and the deeper meaning of the loss of individuality amongst all those subject to the Dystopia's experiments.
• Fission Mailed: After countless successful escapes from the ghost girl in the waters, eventually she captures the child and pulls him deep into the abyss. Cue game over... except that the game continues. He is connected to a strange device and can now swim underwater. And shortly before the end of the game, The kid is pulled inside a disgusting blob of human flesh... but again there is no game over and instead he assumes control over the blob.
• Foreshadowing: Early in the game, you'll go to a barn where several chicks will instinctively flock to you like orphans desperately looking for a new mother. Later, you gain the ability to lead groups of humans into following you and helping you traverse obstacles.
  • In addition, when you fling the chicks onto a crate above to get it down, the chicks fall and one of them stays on the floor, apparently dead. Just like one of the bodies used as part of having to get through a certain door. Instead of mind-controlling it, you have to drag it onto a platform with the bodies you control to activate the door release.
• Friendly Enemy: The Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl tries to kill you most of the time, but in your last encounter she gives you Super Not-Drowning Skills.
• Full-Boar Action: One early confrontation is with a very, very irritable pig. It's big, it's ugly and it shrieks.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Many of the remote bodies you find later in the game are stripped naked, and this serves to highlight just how inhuman they are. The Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl found in the underwater sections is also apparently naked, and she is still quite the threat. Upon reaching the Normal Playthrough endgame the player character is stripped naked and then gawked at by onlookers, then he gets to enact a little vengeance.
• Furniture Blockade: The player barely escapes from a pack of rabid dogs by slipping through a hole in a building wall and knocking over a large filing cabinet to block them from getting in.
• Gainax Ending: Following in Limbo tradition, both endings are very confusing:
  • The 'normal' ending: the massive blob of flesh you've become breaks out of the facility and tumbles all the way down a mountain slope, coming to rest in a shaft of light on a beach - which is implied moments before to not be a real place. Cue credits.
  • The 'secret' ending: you enter the vault in the cornfield and discover a room with a mind control helmet in the background, hooked up to nothing but wires. You pry a wall panel loose and disconnect a cable, and the room falls dark... and you assume the crouched, unresponsive pose of a dormant remote body. Cue fade to black.
• Guide Dang It!: Accessing the hidden ending. Once all the Orbs are deactivated, the light on the billboard denoting the 2nd Orb stays on. If you remember that that Orb is below the cornfield underneath a trap door that blends into the Earth, congratulations on making it that far. However, there's a 3-point lever control to open the door in that bunker. The solution to the 14-lever push combination is a musical melody, and it's played by the reel-to-reel cassette beside the 5th Orb, the one beside the giant E that unlocks the Obscure Foundations achievement.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: If the man sitting alone in the big office near the end is indeed the director/CEO of the lab conducting horrific human experiments and/or generating a race of humanoid slaves, then seeing him splattered by the Huddle (his possible own creation), gives one a strangely satisfying feeling.
• Hope Spot: You climb up a chain out of a flooded area, heading for a catwalk bathed in the first rays of sunlight you've seen since you left the city... and then the chain slips, and you fall back down into the water, where the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl seizes you to give you the "upgrade" that will eventually lead you to the Huddle. You won't see the sun again until the very end, and by then you have been subsumed by a mass of flesh.
• Homage: This game shares a lot of imagery and puzzles with Another World.
• Humanoid Abomination: The... things you see in glass cubicles near the end of the game.
• Humans Are Bastards: Seemingly one of the themes of the game: the facility the boy ventures through is a vast and almost otherworldly place filled with horrific and unnatural experiments and projects, but at the end of the day it's run by simple humans - some engage in casual small-talk together, some bring their kids to work, and none of them see anything wrong with the things they do on the job or hunting down a little boy like the protagonist, even if he is an intruder.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: There are segments where the bad guys are in the background and you have to avoid their line of sight. Those guys will shoot you in one or two shots from a pretty good distance and sometimes from a moving truck.
• In Medias Res: Implied at the beginning in a way more prominent than Limbo. Where that game's boy takes his time to wake up in a forest, this boy slides down a rock face and starts gameplay almost immediately after the game boots up. Like everything else in the game, any immediate questions about what he's doing there and where he came from are never made fully obvious.
• Kill the Cutie: Your character isn't quite as cute as the avatar in Limbo, but he's still gonna die.
• Little Dead Riding Hood: While he doesn't have a hood, the boy dresses in bright red and starts the game in a forest - the symbolism should be clear.
• Lost in the Maize: While on the run, the player walks through an ominous cornfield where their view is almost entirely obscured. There are small things running around your feet, but they just turn out to be chicks. The secret ending requires finding a bunker hidden under the cornfield.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Unlike Limbo, this game is rated M for Mature. It doesn't take long to see why.
  • Gruesome deaths may be borderline non-existent in the first half (the worst being attack dogs ripping your throat out), but the Cruel And Unusual Deaths in the latter half often have the player character blown into chunks of flesh, blood, and entrails.
  • You're very likely to cause the death of the person who may be the director of the lab during your rampage. After tackling him out a window, you then land on top of him, causing him to explode into red paste and you getting a large red smear on you.
• Malevolent Masked Men: The people in the beginning are all wearing masks.
• The Many Deaths of You: Of course. However, it is implied that the CEO wants the boy captured alive, as the armed guards use tranquilizer darts rather than bullets. Also, if an adult catches the boy, they subdue him with what looks like chloroform rather than outright strangling him.
• Matchstick Weapon: In one of the secret orb locations, the boy takes a wall-mounted torch and must use it to fend off some stray guard dogs
• Mature Work, Child Protagonists: Seems to be a running theme for the developer given this is their next game after Limbo
• Meaningful Background Event: Most of the story and world-building in INSIDE is all showcased in the background, thanks to the game's singular perspective.
• Mickey Mousing: Music pulses to match the march of Brainwashed humans. It becomes a gameplay element, in which the boy must pretend to be one of them, marching and jumping with them on cue.
• Mind Control: The game seems to take place in a world where some sort of mind control technology is being tested on humans. The humans are seemingly corpses that you can use as remote bodies. The technology is based off of the parasitic worms found by the boy in the farm. Both endings reveal that the Mind Control might be more extensive than the helmets you find controlling the worker bodies:
  • In the standard ending, inactive mind control helmets are connected to the Huddle, the fleshmass in the giant sphere. We don't see them power on, but their purpose can be inferred in...
  • ...the hidden ending, in which the boy disconnects the power to a mind control helmet connected to a computer rig and immediately slumps over like the rest of the zombies. This ending is only unlocked by deactivating all of the Orbs in the game, which glow the same yellow as the mind control helmets. It's possible that the Huddle was to be a Hive Mind that controlled all of the working slaves and that the Orbs are signal boosters, it's just that the technology wasn't perfected yet, which is why the Huddle's inputs are not turned on. And it becomes pretty clear by summing up both endings that the boy is a remote body being used as a "free will" variable that the company will edge out with more testing.
• Mind Screw: There's enough going on in this game that it will take a replay or two to fully grasp what is being said by the game and its story. Playdead is staying silent on what it all means.
• Minimalism: Just like Limbo, there's no dialogue, exposition, the controls are uncomplicated and the gameplay straightforward, which all serves to bolster the game's sense of atmosphere and mystery. There are slight differences in implementation — in addition to there being slightly more color, where Limbo focuses extensively on symbolism and abstract metaphor, INSIDE leans more towards the literal mysteries of the dystopia the boy finds himself exploring. In addition, the characters, in particular the player character, do not even appear to have faces.
• Mood Whiplash: The game takes a rather drastic tonal shift when you find the Huddle inside the sphere. The giant fleshy mass is at first repulsive, but the rampage that follows is cathartic and hilarious, albeit in a pitch black manner.
• Multiple Endings: There is a second ending for those who locate and destroy all the disco ball-like "collectibles" in the game, find a very well-hidden secret location, and enter the right combination on a door.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: For a scrawny looking kid, the protagonist manages to go through a non-stop course of obstacles that even the most athletic of people would be hard-pressed to finish even half of.
• Mysterious Past: We never find out where the boy came from or why he's out in the woods. Both endings imply that he's trying to dismantle whatever thing is keeping people mind-controlled, as well as showing that he's a remote body in the secret ending... or at least reacts to the mind control shutting off.
• Nested Ownership: Mind-controlled bodies can be used to control other bodies by putting them in another helmet.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Following in Limbo's footsteps.
  • As you approach the final areas in the game, you notice more and more people in the background, running in the same direction you're going. Eventually, they start running right past you, ignoring you completely. You find them all pressed up against a giant glass window looking into a massive spherical tank, but even if you press up against the glass yourself, you don't see what they're looking at. Up until this point, every other human being you've encountered has been both engaging in monstrous human experimentation, and willing to drop everything to try and kill you on sight. For whatever is in the tank to be interesting enough to garner their undivided attention, it must be something awful. You don't find out what's in the tank until you go inside it yourself.
  • There's an enormous room containing something continuously emitting shockwaves powerful enough to shatter concrete and turn the boy into a red mist. You never find out what's causing this, or what its purpose is.
  • After gaining Super Not Drowing Skills thanks to the swimming girl helping him, the boy passes through what appears to be a submerged examination room, and... something can be seen floating in the dark behind the glass in one of the holding chambers. We never find out what this thing is.
• The Oner: The whole game is played in the style of this, although it can be interrupted.
• People Farms: The player very quickly comes across a few trucks carting off people. Some nearby pods and guards imply that these people are being hunted, and is possibly why the boy is being so cautious in his escape. Pretty soon though, it becomes clear that these people are more like People Puppets and were possibly converted by the pods to become just that. You later see evidence that the scientists tried converting people indoors in the artificial forests. Further on, there are lab-grown bodies apparently incubating in huge pools of water that obey the mind control even though they are deformed and misshaped up to the point where some don't even have heads. The game itself implies that the Huddle is being used (or is intended to be used) as a control for all of these puppets, but it's never made clear why this society needs them or the sirens that can breathe underwater.
• Pressure Plate: A game mechanic carried over from Limbo. One segment revolves around exploring an area to gather enough remote bodies to stand on a plate with a high requirement of people to weigh it down.
• Pretend to Be Brainwashed: An entire puzzle section depends on you successfully blending in with the controlled humans as they proceed through an inspection line.
• Primal Fear: The rabid dogs won't ever stop hunting you down and are deterred by nothing - until the child finds a lit torch, which scares the dogs enough so they won't come close.
• Rasputinian Death: While the remote bodies are about as durable as a regular human form and can break bones and lose limbs, nothing short of complete dismemberment seems to outright stop them. At several points in the game you'll see a limb or a torso try to crawl after you if you're wearing one of the mind control hats, and a couple of remote bodies will follow after you even with clearly broken necks. The Body of Bodies Blob Monster you get consumed by and control in the last portion of the game can barrel through cement, wood, and glass like tissue paper and can leave impact craters from high falls with no repercussions, but it is still a fleshy mass of bodies that can lose limbs or get burned.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The normal ending sequence features you tearing up the facility you were just sneaking through.
• Run or Die: Like Limbo, the boy you control can occasionally fight back using his wits. But in a bit of added realism, and because the game takes place in a tightly controlled dystopian city instead of an anarchistic forest, he's given far fewer opportunities to do so. All it takes is one adult to catch him, and it's all over. Oh, and you have no time to hesitate; if something is chasing you, chances are you will make it to the obstacle to stop them just before they grab you.
• Shout-Out:
  • References to Playdead's previous game Limbo are very easy to miss. A silhouette of that game's boy is hidden in the fern seen in the foreground of the title screen. That boy's head is also on in-game coffee mugs. Limbo's elevator and magnet boxes fall off a table that the Huddle lands on during the endgame sequence.
  • The dresser used as a barricade against the dogs can be broken to produce a Game Boy.
  • Ciphers etched onto glass panels in the labs decipher the title of an E. E. Cummings poem, pity this busy monster, manunkind, which is a lament of the triumph of progress and its subjugation and rejection of the natural world. Sound familiar?
  • One possible one lies at the entrance to the city: the boy will pass a sign on top of a building big enough for three letters. The R is laying down beside the sign, the C is still attached in the far right position, and the E is hidden below, beside an Orb. This spells out [REC].
• Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking: Individual Identification. Near the end of the game, you will encounter the last one of the orbs, and on the wall behind it you can see activated lights representing the orbs you have already collected. However, if you would like to know where exactly these are hidden, you might still need a guide.
• Soft Water: Any time you have to fall a long distance, there will turn out to be a convenient body of water below. It's at least realistic enough to show you ending up quite deep in it before regaining control.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: You confront a version of this in a flooded section that flees from your light, though she's more a zombie than a ghost. She may or may not be based on the myth of the Lorelei or Sirens. The violent "drown you to death" kind.
• Scenery Porn: The vignettes in this game really justify the six year development time. Much like Limbo, critics have described the world and its environment as "beautifully bleak"; in other words, the game fleshes out how bleak settings have their own beauty to appreciate.
• Super Drowning Skills: Downplayed. Your character can swim, but it only takes a couple seconds of him being underwater before he drowns. Late into the game, a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl attaches the boy to some sort of device that gives him Super Not-Drowning Skills, allowing him to stay underwater indefinitely.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Your character gains these after being temporarily attached to a massive mind-control helmet by the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl.
• Super Swimming Skills: Your character may not have Super Not-Drowning Skills (not at first, at least), but he's got superb swimming skills for a kid. This is in contrast to your character in Limbo, who had Super Drowning Skills.
• Symbolic Serene Submersion: Encouraged, but at the player's discretion. After the boy gains his Super Not-Drowning Skills, he traverses many vast, flooded areas, sometimes with fish in them. At any time the player can put down the controller and just watch him float as long as they'd like. This plays with the game's themes of depth, pressure, and control versus surrender.
• Tested on Humans: The above-mentioned Mind Control technology. The whole game also appears to be this—all of the lab equipment in the office building/science hall at the end of the game appears to be for human experimentation, and there are some pretty disturbing visuals of multiple people being mutilated for science.
  • Several points in the game, right from the beginning until the end, hint that the Mind Control might be more extensive than the remote bodies show. Depending on your point of view, the game could be anything from scientists enslaving people to perform tests on them to putting them into mind control, with the blob near the end supposedly being the one keeping them controlled.
• Too Dumb to Live: After becoming the Huddle, you swim over to the looking glass and begin to break it. For some reason, one of the onlookers thinks he can prevent your escape by pushing on the glass. It doesn't end well for him.
• Turn the Other Cheek: Near the very end of the game, you're given an opportunity for revenge... but if you're careful, you don't have to take it. When, as the Huddle, you reach the man who might be the Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for everything you've suffered, he's standing in your way, and the obvious route is to just keep going, sending him through his window and to his doom. But if you stop charging when he's got his back against the window and just stare him down, he'll eventually take the hint and get out of your way, allowing you to spare him.
  • During your rampage as the Huddle, it's also possible to crush random office workers who get in your way if you're moving fast enough. But if you go slow, they'll have enough time to get out of the way.
• Twist Ending: More like a wild veer off the road ending. You will NOT see it coming. Suffice it to say it appears that the main character's goal was to disable the giant blob by pulling off mind-control helmets plugged on to it, but he gets absorbed into it, and through it, goes on a rampage, destroying the facility — and a man who looks suspiciously like a Corrupt Corporate Executive, the only intentional death in the game. The game also shifts from a tonally bleak cinematic platformer into a comedic, almost Benny Hill-esque rampage. Oh, and to top it all off, the game has ANOTHER ending that implies the boy to be just another mind controlled human, and that YOU were the one controlling him.
• Unnecessarily Large Interior: As the game progresses, the environments just get larger and larger until the player can see for literal miles in the distance. An early environment shows sequoia and redwood trees (on average 220-300 feet tall) growing inside of a testing area. The vast, unused submerged chasms were nonchalantly built on top of with similarly large structures.
• The Unreveal: The player never learns many things about the world of the game, making it that much more frightening. Why are the adults showing their children the zombie mindslaves? Are they citizens paying for them? Why are the citizens wearing masks but the scientists aren't? Who or what is controlling the spotlights? What is that cabled spinal dart they shoot out for? What does the shockwave zone even do and why is it there? Is it all part of an elaborate barrier keeping the scientists away from some outside threat? Or is it to keep something inside? Was it the mind control worms that killed the farm animals, or something else? Is that why citizens outside the lab wear masks? Where does the boy originate from? Do we really ever get outside?
• The Voiceless: Everyone, though they do grunt.
• Voodoo Zombie: The undead automatons appear to be technological versions of this.
• Wham Shot: A few.
  • Upon entering the office building and maneuvering your way into the tank that all of the office workers and others are looking into, you find what they're all staring at: a gigantic Body of Bodies, floating in a tank of water.
  • During your rampage as the Huddle, you smash into a doorway, revealing what may be a Corrupt Corporate Executive, scared shitless, against a window. Behind said window is a very, very, very long fall. Pretty easy to guess what that means.
  • Finally, while smashing open one final wall, the blob that is you falls through, revealing the outside world. You fall, rolling down a hill, before coming to rest in the single bit of sunlight in the entire game. Roll credits.
  • The secret ending is one as well.
• Whoosh in Front of the Camera: This is used to foreshadow the appearance of a creepy aquatic foe. We see it dash through our field of vision a few scenes before it shows up.
• Would Hurt a Child: The Adults have no problem with loosing attack dogs on or firing guns at a young boy.

---