Inside Is the Closest Thing to a ‘Perfect’ Game I’ve Ever Played

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Inside. Holy shit. That’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I think about that game. It has now been 10 years since it was released… as an Xbox exclusive. I expect most people probably don’t remember this, but Inside was, for a brief few days in late June/early July 2016, only available on Xbox One. It then released the following week on PC, but it would be almost two months until it arrived on PS4 at the end of August.

While Inside was eventually available to play almost everywhere, it’s worth remembering that it was the long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s Limbo, itself one of the best games of the Xbox 360 era and one of the defining games of the brilliant Xbox Live Arcade downloadable-game initiative. If you ask me what my favorite XBLA game ever is, my answer was and probably still is Limbo. It was that incredible a game. And so once the notoriously meticulous developer Playdead slowly chipped away at the follow-up – Inside wasn’t even announced until E3 2014 – it took up permanent residence on my own personal Most Anticipated Games list. When it finally arrived in June of 2016, I jumped at the chance to review it for IGN.

I knew it’d be short – Limbo was roughly four hours long – but I didn’t know how perfect it would be. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: there’s no such thing as a perfect video game. It’s a subjective work of commercial art. (And for the record, 10 out of 10 on the IGN review scale means “masterpiece,” not “perfect.”) But right from the first jump, every frame of Inside seemed perfectly polished. There was nary a framerate hitch, animations seemed buttery smooth, sound design was impeccable, and every movement with the gamepad was precise and pristine.

And then I got to the climactic portion of its dialogue-free story. It was, to put it mildly, unlike anything I’d ever seen in a video game before: monstrous, curious, intriguing, and in a twisted way, delightful. It upended the mechanics of the final act while leaving plenty of unanswered questions floating in my mind.

It’s been a decade and I still don’t want to spoil that finale, because spoiling Inside for even just one person feels like a crime. But, at the risk of giving away a tiny piece of the mystery, I’ll share this little-known fun fact: Inside is the only game I’m aware of that has ever had a Collector’s Edition (released well after the fact) made by a sex-doll company (warning: spoilers at that unboxing link).

Inside was even shorter than Limbo – it took me about 3.5 hours to finish on my first playthrough. But it’s still three and a half of the best hours I’ve ever spent with a controller in my hands. It told an engaging story without a single line of dialogue, and its ending remains open for interpretation in that rare brilliant way where no theory about what Inside is trying to say is truly right or wrong. If you play it today, you’ll find it hasn’t aged a day.

I can laugh now over the very first-world problem I had when I reviewed it: finishing it before it was available to the public and having absolutely no one to talk to about it for a few weeks. Well, almost no one. At E3 that year, I had a chat with then-Xbox boss Phil Spencer. He’d finished it too, of course, and while there was still time to wait until Inside launched and a public consensus was arrived at, Spencer already knew it was more than special.

“It’s the game of the year,” he told me. And he was right.

I voted for it in IGN’s 2016 end-of-year awards. Sadly, Overwatch won out. I still think it should’ve been Inside.

All of this is to say that Inside was a rare bright spot for Xbox in the otherwise-grim Xbox One era. Today, anyone can enjoy it, and if you haven’t, please take this as my highest recommendation that you should. It won’t take long, you won’t regret it, and by sheer wonderful coincidence as I write this, it happens to be on sale on Steam (until August 16) for just $2.49. Yes, it’s 90% off. It’s almost free!

As for me, I’m going to continue waiting patiently for Playdead’s next game, which still hasn’t even been officially announced, let alone released. There are other alternatives to waiting – Playdead’s designer, Jeppe Carlsen, went on to create Coccon, and its co-founder, Dino Patti, produced 2022’s Inside-ish Somerville. But if the six-year gap between Limbo and Inside proved anything, it’s that whatever Playdead is cooking will be well worth the wait.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.