INSIDE

Playdead's 2016 follow-up to Limbo is a wordless side-scrolling puzzle game about a boy running through a facility where something extremely bad is being done to people. There is no dialogue, no text, no map and no explanation. What it has instead is an unusually confident sense of pacing: puzzles teach themselves through a single visual demonstration, the camera pulls back at exactly the moments that make you feel small, and the sound design uses silence more aggressively than most horror games use noise. Mechanically it is simple - run, jump, grab, and occasionally control a line of mind-controlled bodies - but each chapter introduces one new idea and retires it before it wears out, so a four-hour run never repeats itself. The final twenty minutes take a hard turn that reframes everything before it and is best left undescribed. It won most of the art and design awards going in 2016, and remains the shortest game people will still tell you to play immediately.