After reviewing Playdead’s Inside, I thought a lot about the ending. The game is so surrounded in mystery and ambiguity that people have been spending months trying to figure out exactly what the game, and its ending, are supposed to mean. And I think I’ve got it figured out.
Now I’m not going to try and decipher the complex story being told by the environment while playing. Far too many things are open ended to come to any kind of solid conclusion as to what’s really going on. Instead let’s try and figure out the subtext of the game. Its symbolism, themes, and overall purpose.
Okay, so to get those of you who haven’t played the game up to speed, Inside follows a young boy running through an organization in an attempt to escape from people chasing him. To do this, you have to puzzle platform your way through the environment by running, jumping, pulling switches, and controlling brain dead workers. Today we’re going to take a look at the story in an attempt to figure out how everything fits together, so if you haven’t played it yet, spoilers for the entire game are about to happen. We good? Good.
The entire story of Inside is about being trapped and controlled. The main character is forced to run from those chasing him, the slaves are completely controlled by the helmets, the blob is trapped in its cage, and the office workers are trapped in the company, much like how office workers in the real world feel. There’s symbolism of this everywhere, such as the pig being controlled by the parasite and the lemmings mindlessly following the player until getting launched into a box.
This all comes to a head in the game’s ending. The player attempts to free the blob by removing its helmets, only to be sucked in. But then, the player suddenly has control of the blob and goes on a rampage leading them out of the facility and supposedly to freedom. But that’s not what happens. The player is still trapped. Note how earlier, there’s a diorama in the facility depicting the exact location and lighting as the end of the game. This was planned. Staged. The player was supposed to end up here the whole time.
What does this mean? Well sit yourself down because here’s the big reveal: the entire game is an allegory for the relationship between gamers and developers. And the facility you explore is a metaphor for video games.
To fully understand this, we need to take a look at some of this game’s most telling aspects. Starting with its design. At its core, the game is a standard puzzle platformer. Every step of the way has been perfectly calculated so there’s only one way to get through. In each new sequence, the game developers created an environment in which to test you, which is true of any game.
You may have control over the boy, but the game dictates where you and the boy go next. The player may want to do certain things in a game, but in the end the developers control exactly what the player can and cannot do. They control your experience just as much as you control your character.
The children in the water are also representative of this. They dictate whether the player is about to experience a challenge or continue with their adventure. This is why some of them attack, hindering the player’s progress and creating a challenge, while the last one gives the player the ability to breathe underwater.
Story-wise, this makes no sense, but that’s exactly why this scene is so important. This is the devs’ way of saying screw the rules, screw the story, they’re not finished with you yet. They’ve now decided to give you more abilities to continue through the game and the player has no choice in the matter. Again, this is all shown in the ending telling the player that no matter how much control you think you have over the game, you’ll always end up exactly where the devs want you to be in the end.
When you see that blob sitting at the edge of the beach the game isn’t over yet. In order to get the true ending, the player has to deactivate all of the spheres in the game and find the secret bunker in the corn field. Here they see someone in a mind control helmet controlling the boy. They then unplug the helmet’s power source, the boy deactivates, and the game is truly over. That man in the chair, the one controlling the boy, is you. The player. You just unplugged yourself, which is why you no longer have control over the boy.
This is the game’s way of freeing you. Think about it. You can only reach this bunker if you’ve finished the game and gotten all of the collectables. You’ve done everything the game has asked you to do. And with nothing left to do, there’s no longer a reason to control the boy. You making the boy unplug himself is representative of you turning off the game one last time now that everything is finished. You’re now free from this game and able to move on.
So what is the message of Inside? Well I liken it to the twist at the end of the original Bioshock (that’s right there was your spoiler warning). It’s revealed that all of the suggestions being made by a character in the game are really commands that the player’s character is forced to obey and this directly correlates to how games make players feel like they’re accepting missions when in reality they have no choice in the matter if they want to proceed. The player doesn’t have the choice to turn around, go home, have some hot cocoa and read a good book. They have to follow orders in order to play the game. And Inside is the same way.
The difference here is that while Bioshock ends with the player breaking their restrictions and killing the person ordering them around, Inside is much darker. They are asking the player to question why they play games in the first place. What’s the point? You’re not saving a world, helping real people, gaining any real power. Once you turn off the game, much like when you power down the boy at the end of Inside, that avatar you play as, that shell you embody for the entire experience doesn’t matter anymore. Pretty depressing, huh?
And while I could argue all day and night about how the point of gaming is the experiences, emotions, and otherworldly embodiments a player keeps with them in their mind and memories after playing, I can appreciate just how ballsy it is for a game to question why people play videos games and even suggests that they’re all utterly pointless. And I applaud the subtlety with which the message is delivered.
Inside is a complex game with a lot of abstract concepts and an ambiguous means of storytelling. There are multiple layers to its story and this is only one of them. So what do you think? Do you have another theory on what this game means? Is there another game you’d like me to cover in the future? If so, leave a comment down to let me know and be sure to subscribe for more dissections, mighty reviews and other gaming goodness. And as always, have a mighty nifty day today!