Something is lurking in the shadows…
INMOST, by Lithuania-based indie studio Hidden Layer Games, is an emotional and deeply atmospheric narrative-driven puzzle platformer. Uncover the story of an adventurous young girl, a stoic knight and a man in search of answers. Explore a crumbling, nightmarish landscape, slice through enemies, and spring deadly traps in order to escape the evil that awaits…
**INMOST is an intimate story of loss and hope that some may find upsetting. Player discretion is advised.**
This beautifully crafted and genuinely heartfelt little pixel art adventure has some properly bleak scenes contained within as it deals explicitly with its central themes of grief, mourning and the constant battle against abandoning all hope that can follow the loss of a loved one.
In Inmost you take control of three very different characters, a little girl exploring a house full of secrets and terrible memories, a battle-hardened knight making his way through the treacherous bowels of a foreboding castle in the service of some otherworldly evil, and a troubled middle-aged man whose scenes make up the brunt of the game’s clever platforming and puzzling action.
Each of these three characters has their own unique play-style; the little girl isn’t tall enough to reach most surfaces and you’ll therefore need to drag items around and create ways for her to reach objects and access points in order to drive her narrative strand forward, the middle-aged man can jump, climb and acquire multiple items to help him on his way and the knight can hookshot his way around – albeit in a very limited fashion – as he hacks, slashes and dodges his way through the shadowy monstrosities that stalk the game’s nightmarish labyrinth world.
There’s sumptuous detail here in how characters move and interact with this grim maze in which they find themselves trapped. Books fall off shelves as you clamber in and around them, locked doors strain as you push against them, rain beats atmospherically off windows and every weapon slash or interaction you have with a piece of machinery, blocked path or enemy feels weighted and hefty. This is, in short, a fantastically well-crafted experience and one that’s perfectly suited, as is suggested by the developers, to playing through in one sitting, sticking on some headphones and finding some peace and quiet to allow yourself to be drawn right into this dark and disturbing narrative over its roughly four-hour running time.
