Inside

Inside is a puzzle platformer. 5D platform game. The game is dark, with color used sparingly to highlight both the player and certain parts of the environment. The game is mostly silent, with the exception of occasional musical cues, the boy's vocals, dogs barking, equipment and sound effects.

The character can walk, run, swim, climb, and use objects to overcome obstacles and progress in the game. At select areas of the game, the character can use a device (similar in appearance to the later-mentioned glowing orbs) to control bodies in order to complete certain puzzles, a mechanic that IGN's Marty Sliva compared to a similar one in The Swapper. At various points in the game, the player may discover hidden rooms containing glowing orbs. If all the orbs are deactivated during a playthrough, the player unlocks the game's alternate ending.

A boy or young man slides down a rocky incline. While running through a forest, he encounters masked guards with flashlights, as well as vehicles with mounted spotlights, and fierce guard dogs. He escapes the guards, then crosses a road where a block has been set up with more vehicles and guards, to a farm where parasitic worms cause pigs to run rampant. The boy uses the farm animals and equipment to escape to a seemingly abandoned city where lines of zombie-like people are moved through mind control. Beyond the city is a vast underground facility of flooded rooms, a shock wave atrium, and a laboratory environment where scientists perform underwater experiments on bodies.

While traversing these areas, the boy uses a mind-control helmet to control some of the zombies he encounters. The boy comes across an underwater siren-like creature that attaches a device to him, allowing him to breathe underwater.

Playdead released the monochromatic Limbo in July 2010, which was critically praised and sold over one million units. Within a few months of its release, Playdead began development on their second game under the working title "Project 2". As a spiritual successor to Limbo, Inside reclaimed assets from Limbo's development. Playdead said that the two games were similar, though Inside is more "crazy", "weird", and 3D. The Danish Film Institute provided one million dollars in funding towards the game.

While Playdead had built a custom game engine for Limbo, they chose Unity to reduce their workload. The developers created a temporal anti-aliasing filter for the engine, entitled "temporal reprojection", to create a signature look for Inside. In March 2016, Playdead released the source code under an open source license.

Inside received universal acclaim, according to video game review aggregator website Metacritic. Critics favorably compared the title as a worthy successor to Limbo. The game was one of Polygon and IGN's most anticipated 2016 releases. From previewing the game at E3 2016, IGN's Marty Sliva considered the title to be "Super Limbo", polishing and improving from Playdead's first game into the new title in the same manner that Nintendo had done for its previous games in bringing them to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku called the game an "evolution" on what Playdead has succeeded to do with Limbo. Jaz Rignall of USgamer previewed Inside and wrote that it was one of the best puzzle platformers he has played, even better than its predecessor.