The concept of a Horror platformer game is unconventional, to say the least, which makes the Danish videogames studio PlayDead remarkable for making that their specialty. Arnt Jensen founded the studio in 2006 and has released two games so far with a third on the way. The first of their collection was Limbo which was released in 2010, followed by the game's stylistic successor Inside in 2016. Both games have received widespread acclaim for their clever and innovative approach to horror which calls into question the conventions of horror games, and to an extent the modern horror genre.
In both Inside and Limbo, the player character is a little boy trying to survive in a hostile environment. Both games try to create a creepy atmosphere that leaves the player on edge. Neither attempt shock horror instead creating a general sense of unease that follows the player throughout the game. While both games are working to achieve this same goal they take very different stylistic approaches to doing so.
Limbo
Limbo is entirely in black and white, and everything is displayed as a series of silhouettes, reminiscent of a shadow puppet show. The screen has a vintage flickering effect, almost like an old movie projector. These visuals are made even more haunting when paired with the game's bizarre soundtrack, rather than including a soundtrack of typical horror music a PlayDead elected to put no music into Limbo, instead filling the background with mysterious noises the player can’t quite place.
Limbo also limits the player's control which creates a sense of helplessness, but also allows for more creative puzzles later. Limbo only has 3 controls, jump, grab, and move the joystick to walk forward. You can drag some items to different places by grabbing them but otherwise, the player is defenseless. There are no special skills to help the player solve puzzles or survive attacks. When you get hit you die immediately and no cutscene or game guide tells you how to avoid danger, much like the lonely child they play as the player is made to experience the game with no preparation.
Limbo begins with the player wandering alone through the woods, the woods are dark and thick. The game description explains that the boy is looking for his sister. Throughout the first part of the game no other humans are seen, however, you can occasionally see another kid across a gap or over a barrier but when you reach that spot they are gone.
The game takes its first dark turn when you walk through a path and accidentally step on a bear trap and die. The bear trap is the same color and height as the grass around it so unless you know to look for it is unlikely that you would notice that it's there, so most players will die in that moment and must go back to the last checkpoint. These bear traps remain a consistent part of the game moving forwards and can even be moved around by the player to be used against enemies.
Over time the remains of dead children can be found around the forest but not yet any humans. Instead, the next character we meet is a terrifying giant spider. This spider is the primary antagonist of Limbo and the most monstrous thing in the game. The spider’s many limbs are used to create further unease, each one reaching for the player with its pointy end, and if the spider ever reaches you, you will get impaled. The Spider is the most puppet-like of any other part of the game, each segment of its leg is stiff with only its joints moving, much like in shadow puppet theater. The spider is defeated using the bear traps to snap some of its legs off, this is interesting because it is almost like the player’s own deaths acted as the tutorial for this fight.
It is not until after the first spider battle that any other living humans are directly encountered, however, these humans are a group of boys living in a highly trapped fort who try to kill you immediately. Unlike the player character, these children are just black silhouettes without any visible eyes, and some of them are holding weapons like spears and blowguns. Dead children surround these boys' base, and occasionally living children are suspended in the air in cages. The first part of the game follows the player hopefully searching for other humans only to be met with gruesome traps and the implication that they were the ones setting the bear traps in the first place. When the spider returns, she kills all of the children, leaving the player alone once again.
After this the player wanders through a much more industrial area with large dangerous machinery, but no signs of any human life. In these buildings the boy can now only see the horrible things humans have made but has lost any connections to humanity, he no longer sees people in the distance hopefully and there are no longer any wild boys around to hunt him.
When the player makes it through to the end of limbo a mesmerizing sequence occurs which ends with the player character lying in the same spot he was in at the start of the game, the game seemingly places the character in a time loop, however, if you move forwards you can see your sister sitting at the top of a hill with a ladder behind her, she stands up and the game changes to the title card and the credits role. This open ending could mean quite a few things but there is one visual clue that could piece the whole game together. When you first enter the main menu screen the background is the same hill seen in the ending, but with two key differences. Firstly the ladder is broken and too high to reach, and second, scattered in the grass you can see the silhouettes of strange chunks, similar to those that scatter on the ground when you die. What this means is hard to say.
Inside
Inside is in 3d, unlike its 2d predecessor, it has mostly muted colors with some bright exceptions on objects that are meant to stand out. Unlike Limbo, Inside does have music to set the tone, although like Limbo it relies heavily on ambient sound effects and some scenes do not have music at all. The story of Inside is also much more straightforward, having a dystopian sci-fi horror style instead of Limbo’s vintage look. The lighting of Inside is very deliberate and sets a sense of scale to the setting.
Inside has the same controls as Limbo, however, there are many new puzzle-solving mechanics introduced. The player is also not given much guidance again, the feeling of powerlessness however is lessened in this story.
Inside also starts in a dark forest, but as the player walks, they are eventually chased by guards wearing masks and guiding hunting dogs, the guard's flashlights being the brightest thing on the screen., this light immediately becomes associated with danger, which is a visual theme maintained through the rest of the game. The player has to run from the guards for some time and leaves the forest almost immediately. This is where the game becomes much more different than Limbo, inside is much more varied in its locations with several unique environments, a huge expansion on the 3 found in Limbo.
The strange technology found throughout the levels introduces new puzzle [AL1] mechanics, throughout the game the player can find locations with mind control helmets which cause the zombies to be controlled by the player's controller in synch with the protagonist. There are also various sections in which the player has to stay out of spotlights or flashlights to avoid getting caught. And of course, there is no tutorial for any of these mechanics so the player must continue to use trial and error to learn the tricks of survival.
Like Limbo, the humans all look very different than the player character, where he has a bright red sweater the guards and scientists wear sharp black and white outfits. And of course, the zombies are mostly dressed in rags, covering their lumpy limping bodies. Because the player can mind-control the zombies, they end up becoming allies, against the more hostile humans, when they are not controlled, they never attack and when they are they are a necessary tool used to escape the guards. The outcast inhuman monsters becoming a form of safety from the stiff and organized humans is a very interesting play on pre-existing dystopian tropes.
The Zombies are not the only creatures who help the player, but the other example is a rather strange case. In some parts of the game, the player must travel underwater, sometimes through swimming, others using a submarine. When underwater the player will often see a girl swimming in the water with long black hair bigger than her body, she swims away from the light of the submarine and otherwise tries to drown the player. At first it seems that this creature is another enemy but later this comes into question. In the latter half of the game the player encounters the closest thing inside has to a cutscene apart from the ending. The player experiences an unavoidable death, in which the girl drags him down to the bottom of the ocean drowning him, he is undeniably dead, until she resuscitates him and attaches a strange plug to his chest. From that point on the girl is not seen but the player can then breathe underwater.
This tool changes the entire game’s mechanics, but it raises a lot more questions than answers. Who is the strange girl, is there only one or are there a few of them? Why would this one save the boy and why would she drown him in the first place? Where did she come from, could she be human as well? The device that allows water breathing could explain her aquatic life, but it does not explain her bizarre speed and strength. When she attacks the player in the submarine, she can tear the vehicle open with her bare hands. Her fear of light earlier is also comparable to the player's situation, and the boy and the girl being similarly accustomed to the shadows connect them. The girl also is not very physically different from the boy, other than her long hair and lack of clothes she looks mostly the same as him, same size and proportions. The long black hair is very similar to the sister in Limbo, and the connection could mean that the girl could represent a form of shelter or care, just as the sister did before.
The game takes one last bizarre twist, the player accidentally finds themselves inside a water filled tank surrounded by glass and observing scientists. The player bangs on the glass walls but is not acknowledged. When the player swims to the center of the tank they will see a giant terrifying creature waiting there. The creature is a mass of arms and legs jutting out of a peach potato-shaped blob, the limbs wriggle around and do not consistently stay in one place or position. The way the mass wiggles it moves more like a half-empty water balloon than anything else, and the animation style used to create it is different than the one used in the rest of the game. The result is a truly terrifying otherworldly looking being that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. The creature is called the huddle and according to PlayDead studios was the first idea for the game which everything else spun out of. The player then will notice 4 giant cables sticking out of the Huddle, which they can then pull out. After pulling out the third, however, the boy will then be sucked into the hole left by the cable. The boy is shockingly absorbed into the huddle which wriggles itself free from the final cable. From this point on the boy is no longer the player character, and the player has full control over the huddle.
The feeling of the game changes immediately, unlike the frail child the Huddle is incredibly strong and can bust through the walls of the building it is trapped in with ease. The humans who chased the player not long ago are just as small to the huddle as the boy was to them, and they flee the huddle’s presence, some of them using similar techniques the boy used to avoid them earlier, ducking behind objects and staying away from lights. The symmetry behind the boy's fear and the human’s fear makes the whole game feel different, both in reflection and during gameplay.
The Huddle cannot be damaged by anything in the game, so the player no longer must fear death in any way, but with every move or impact the Huddle makes a sad hurt sound despite its inability to be harmed. The noise the huddle makes is made up of many small human voices which are warped and muffled. The impression is that the Huddle is simply always in pain, its unnatural existence does not seem comfortable. The rest of the gameplay is the huddle going on a destructive rampage, killing humans, and destroying large sections of the building they are in. Eventually, the humans successfully lure the Huddle back into the tank and seal it. Unbeknownst to them there is a wall on the far side of the enclosure which the huddle can break, which does not lead to the rest of the building but to the outside world.
Once the wall is broken the Huddle is left to tumble down a steep grassy hill hitting rocks on the way, down away from the building. The Huddle eventually stops on an empty beach with grass dotted sparsely around it. A ray of light engulfs its body but this time the light is not harsh like the rest of the game, instead the scene feels free and safe, as the violent chase finally comes to a close. The Huddle still moves slightly but it shrinks in size and flattens against the ground partially, the visual effect is hard to process but it emotes like tense muscles relaxing. The ocean around is much less mirky than the water previously encountered, and it is hard to look at the scene without wondering about the strange girl and questioning her connection to these events. The name of the huddle is very interesting, a huddle is a small gathering involved in team planning with sports or other competitions, it implies community and cooperation. Considering the way the boy assimilated into the huddle and the mass of limbs it seems that the huddle is made up of many humans, though what happened to lead to this form one could only imagine. How the humans like the security guards and scientists kept the boy in fear for the entire game was the scariest part of the game, and although the huddle looks grotesque, uniting with it provided the player with safety and eventually liberation. The huddle could be connected to the themes of community present in Limbo, the idea that finding a group of other people can mean a sense of safety is in a way fully realized in the Huddle. Though it is terrifying to think what it went through to get there, it is beautiful to see this ending where the boy became connected to a community that cannot be taken away.
Inside also contains a surprise secret ending, across the game the player can find strange glowing balls which when pulled on fall apart and break. If all of them are broken the player unlocks a secret area that contains a secret ending scene. In the room, the boy can approach a mind control helmet. And when unplugged the boy will mysteriously turn into a zombie. The game will then end, which introduces some interesting possibilities, the boy could be getting mind-controlled the entire time, as could every other human. Potentially the only difference between zombies and humans is how they are being controlled and for what purpose. Alternatively, this helmet could be holding back whatever turns humans into zombies or containing that same force within itself. The scene also raises the question of how people became zombies anyway, could it be caused by the mind control device, or could controlling the zombies be a response to a pre-existing situation?
Like many parts of Inside, we will never fully know what the writers intended for these details, and that is clearly by design. PlayDead never tells the story to their audience, much like with their gameplay the player must go and experience the story to understand what they see and come to their conclusions, filling in the gaps with their nightmares. The story of Inside is much more noticeable, there are more clues along the way to the ending than there were in Limbo and traditional gamers are more likely to feel fulfilled by Inside than Limbo. However, both games manage to create a very palpable tone that is much more in line with what the horror genre should be. Little is known about the next steps for PlayDead, but if their future is anything like their past then horror games are sure to be shaken to their core whenever their next project is released.