10 Times Gameplay Directly Informed The Narrative
8. Inside
From the moment you hit the start button Inside is a confounding and stunning meditation on not only player agency but human autonomy as a whole - points if you guessed I'm a pretentious liberal arts graduate.
If it were possible, PlayDead's sophomore effort following Limbo somehow gives away even less than its predecessor. There's technically a start menu, but it's also the very first moment of the game, so it's hard to say that this is definitively when the game begins. Maybe when you selected it. Or when you downloaded it.
Protagonist: a nameless, faceless child. You're provided with no objective, but, perhaps out of habit, you hold down the analog stick. Instinctively pushing ahead. Nothing that happens after this is given any context. There's no background, and barely anything to suggest what anything means. There's just enough to make you hope you'll be let in on some secret.
By the end, you're given no satisfaction. Even if you get the 'secret' ending - after making sure you found all the collectibles we completionists adore - you're given no hints as to what the real point was. If anything it only intensifies the question of 'Why did I do any of this?'
And then you close the game. And keep pushing ahead.