Limbo vs Inside

Good things don’t last forever and after Inside shipped in 2016, playdead would never be the same again. Major pillars would begin to leave the indie Danish studio. Co-founder Dino Patti left after what was reported as creative differences with co founder Arnt Jensen and would eventually go on to co-found Jumpship with their debut title Somerville releasing at the end of 2022.

Jeppe Carlson who was the lead gameplay designer on both Limbo and Inside also left the company to found Geometric Interactive with fellow playdead programmer and composer, Jakob Schmid. Their debut title, Cocoon, is due out in 2023 and in the words of the studio is Legend of Zelda meets Portal.

According to Dino Patti, when talking to GamesBeat in 2017, playdead was around 13-15 people when Limbo shipped as playdead liked to keep the team lean and contract out when needed. When a company loses this much of its core talent, it can’t just be replaced to form the same thing, it will be different. Whatever game Arnt Jensen and the rest of playdead is currently working on now isn’t necessarily going to be worse or better because of these changes in personnel but it will be different.

playdead took the gaming scene by storm in 2010 with the Xbox 360 exclusive Limbo that would open the door for indie games in the years that follow. Limbo was an ultra stylistic, monotone platformer that was much more than what it appeared to be. A few delays and six years later, playdead released Inside, another 2D platformer dripping with atmosphere and deeper meaning.

Both games have a lot of similarities and are not only great games, but they are great experiences that transcend the medium. With the recent release of Somerville, it got a lot of people talking about playdead again and I found myself trying to figure out which game was better. When it comes to playdead 1.0, what is better, Limbo or Inside?

Spoiler Zone

Quick warning, there will be plenty of spoilers regarding both Limbo and Inside as it becomes impossible to compare and dissect what makes each game special without talking about their story, and deeper meanings, all which take place through events in the game without any dialogue.

Some of these themes are also pretty uncomfortable to talk about for some people. Nothing here is factual, as Playdead has never publicly explained the meaning of their games, leaving everything open to interpretation and thats what makes them so powerful. The amazing thing about art is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and their impact will be different to every single person that plays them.

Before heading into comparisons, it’s important to talk about each game first.

Limbo

This was the worlds first introduction to playdead and there is no better introduction than the title screen being black and white and Limbo occupying 80% of the screen. It was a bold choice that demanded your attention. There is also no doubt in my mind that after playing Limbo more than once, you are dead. You and your sister both died in the woods. On the most basic level, Limbo means the the place where souls go right before you pass on to heaven or hell.

Having never been to limbo, it’s to be assumed that it would be like a nightmare with some of your worst fears repeating until you escape. There are things that happen during the course of the game that echo this sentiment. This world is filled with things that would give most young kids nightmares including spiders and drowning.

The inescapable nature of this world shows its matrix like qualities when the giant spider impales you. You attempt the same escape again, only this time the spider still has your corpse impaled on one of his legs before he shakes you off to chase you down again. Could it be sloppy programming? Possibly, but playdead seem like perfectionists and a studio that would purposefully leave that in.

One of the three main areas of Limbo is the giant hotel in the middle of the forest, which has to be a nod to Hotel California by the eagles, which has a much deeper meaning than many know. Its been known to be about the in between. “I was thinking to myself this could be heaven or this could be hell” and “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave” The band has even publicly said that every time the character walks through the door, there is a new version of reality.

At the end of Limbo on the final puzzle, you manipulate gravity so that you can float past giant blades and when done correctly you pass through from life to the afterlife after falling to your death in the forest.

Inside

On the surface, Inside appears to be about mind control and horrible corporations doing horrible experiments on people. For me, just like Limbo, the meaning is hidden in plain sight. The title of the game is Inside, which leads me to believe that the game is a metaphor for what is happening in your body. How sickness absorbs everything in its way, like cancer or mental illness. Depending on what you want to see, it can be there.

Once you see something you can’t unsee it. You might be thinking about the mind controls caps all around the game and the explanation is that these are all nodes, a network fully connecting one part of the body to the next. The blob at the end is clearly the illness that goes after the healthy cells in your body. The scientists all over the factories are actual doctors that are trying to find and help you but sometimes, just like the dogs, it can hurt you, in the same way that chemotherapy and other treatments can hurt you.

You travel all around this once thriving world and find abandoned farms, broken down factories, crashed trains. In the way that the body was once a thriving habitat, sickness can derail a lot of things.

I think people create what they know and what is close to them. Hyper Light Drifter, for example, has a lot to do with Heart Machine’s founder Alyx Preston, who has had numerous surgeries on his heart since birth and still lives with heart problems. The main character is clearly dealing with something terminal and it’s not hard to see that the character is trying to repair the four chambers of a heart before it’s too late.

I think the idea for Inside came from someone at playdead, who had someone close to them diagnosed with something terrible Art is how many people cope with grief and playdead has shown penchant for dealing with uncomfortable topics just like the death of a young child in Limbo.

Comparison

Critical

Inside gets the edge here with a critical average of 91 compared to Limbo which averaged an 83.

Art/Visuals

The noir minimalist visual style of Limbo is much more attention grabbing as there are very few games bold enough to go without color and even when they were developing the game, some publishers they met with first told them the game should have been color.

However, the muted color pallete of Inside does a lot more for the game as the pops of color are much more impactful and draw your attention with the reds and the yellows. This also helps with the pacing and accessibility as these splashes of color serve as environmental assistance.

Gameplay

Even though both games are three button controls with move, jump and grab, Inside feels more refined. Doing tougher platform sections in Limbo sometimes feels like the character is at fault, and in Inside it always felt like the player. The controls were refined to the point that mistakes were your own.

Sound

Limbo perfects the sound of being lost and isolated but it isn’t as varied as Inside, which has so many different sounds from the absolutely terrifying dogs, to the muddy areas to the muffled people of the blob and the underwater sections. The developers even went as far as to record all the sounds through a skull. The sound of Inside is constantly on a mission to make you feel uneasy.

Atmosphere

The world feels scary and hostile in Limbo but it’s mostly a forest and some small industrial areas. When it comes to Inside, the game is constantly moving from being lost in a forest, to abandoned farms, empty roads, giant factories, human experiments. The shifting of backdrops of Inside all share in the atmosphere that creates a larger sense of discomfort.

Meaning/Impact

If we are going by what I think the two games are about, then the symbolism of Inside just hits a little harder. There are few games that I have played before and after Inside that have left just completely unsure of what I just witnessed. Almost in disbelief of what just happened. From the moment you become part of the blob, Inside is like nothing else and how everything that happens in the game that sticks with you for days as you try to wrap your head around what has just transpired.

What is the better playdead game?

Ill be honest, heading into this video, I was on the side of Limbo being the better game, having played them initially when they both came out, Limbo resonated with me more due to how original the game was from the visuals to the concept and everything in between. Limbo also came out of nowhere from a small, independent Danish studio that created no expectations for the game.

The six years between Limbo and Inside was a long time for hype to build up but also for many other amazing indie experiences. Inside didn’t surprise me the same way Limbo did since it was mostly a refinement of the playdead formula. However, upon recently revisiting both of these games to determine which one is best, the clear winner is Inside.

Inside is inaccessbile at first, you are only confused by the whole game and then by time the credits rolled, you have no idea what just happened. Returning to Inside, not only increased my appreciation for the title, which was already very high but solidified it as one of my top ten games of all time.

There wasn’t a single category that I thought Inside didn’t win with ease. Dino Patti once said something along the lines that Inside was as perfect a game as the studio could have made and this isn’t egotistical, this is true. Its hard to find flaws with Inside. If there is no such thing as a perfect game, then Inside is as close to one as it can get.